The theory of literature of James Branch Cabell

THE THEORY OF LITERATURE OF
JAMES BRANCH CABELL

By
CHARLES FARRELL GRAY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
IN PARTUL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
August, 1966

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

3 1262 08552 5375

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE iv

PART I INTRODUCTION: TERMINOLOGY AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE

THEORY OF LITERATURE 1

1. The Dynamic Illusion of Common Sense 7

2. The Dynamic Illusion of Religion 7

3. The Dynamic Illusion of Patriotism and

Politics 8

4. The Dynamic Illusion of Chivalry 9

5. The Dynamic Illusion of Optimism 10

PART II FICTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF LITERATURE 25

Character 25

Poet-Heroes 25

Supernatural Characters 48

Women 58

The Allegorical Journey and Thematic Pattern ... 67

Places 85

Emblems 100

PART III HISTORICAL POETS AND THE THEORY OF LITERATURE 108

CONCLUSION 136

BIBLIOGRAPHY 139

VITA 141

111

PREFACE

James Branch Cabell has until recently been treated by critics
as a writer completely out of tune with his age — a romanticist and an
impressionist in an age of social consciousness and The Humanism of
More, Babbitt and Forester. The author's pose has been accepted as the
final critical position about his works. This study of his theory of
literature and its presentation, The Biography of the Life of Pom Manuel
(1927-30), explores Cabell's complex mind and his consistent philosophi-
cal and fictive vision. Out of his sardonic and romantic sense of ar-
tistry and style came a composite of critical theories from the past
and from his contemporaries. Although he ignores the social conscious-
ness and the prevailing literary rebellion of the 1920' s and 1930' s to
strike a seemingly outmoded literary pose, it is this presentation which
best sustains his notions of the human condition and of true literature.
Underneath the facade and woven into the medieval and romantic tapestries
is a perspective, a vision, that lights up most of man's doubts and
dreams and forces the reader to examine his own values in life and
literature.

A searching examination of universal human behavior cannot be
separated from a theory of literature because the success of the skepti-
cal romantic position lies in its insistence upon a critical literary
theory. The theorist plays fictional slight-of-hand, working his ideas
through character, patterns of action and theme, place, and emblem; cre-
ating a magical illusion of other times; shaping a completely realized

iv

heterocosmos, a world and a universe with its own abstractions and gods.
Action does not slow down for a fictional status to present ideas; it
moves without pause — the work of a self-expressive imagination that
thinks and creates in historical, literary, mythical, and metaphysical
forms. The characters, the patterns, the settings and the ideas are
forged into a single effect — Cabell's coherent fictive vision of the
world and the literature wrought out of that world.

That vision is expressed in The Biography as a theory of litera-
ture. Cabell himself does not use the phrase, theory of literature, and
for purposes of this discussion it needs a definition. The phrase sug-
gests the complex ideas or notions (as Cabell would prefer to call them)
concerning the act of creating a work of fiction, the nature of the
creator or poet, the materials used — both life and words — to make the
work, and the audience who responds to the completed work. Cabell treats
all of these aspects of literary theory in The Biography.

The manner and mode of the presentation is an elaborate fiction
with a dominating metaphorical structure. The Cabellian characters, both
human and supernatural, are arranged in an intricate genealogy which be-
gins in Medieval France and ends in Modern Virginia. However, it is not
ancestral relationships as such which occupy his attention. Rather it is
dominant attitudes that characterize the men and women who descend from
Manuel the Redeemer. The genealogical metaphor gives order to the theories
about human nature and literature. Cabell consolidates this metaphor
into a genealogical table. The Lineage of Lichfield, also an outline of
The Biography.

Since the major presentations of this theory are fiction, the
analysis of it should concentrate on aspects of fiction as well as the
terms and conception of literary theory. These aspects are characters,
action, theme, setting and symbol or emblem. The theory, however, is
grounded on a philosophical position which Cabell expounds in both fic-
tion and non-fiction in the epilogue and prologue of The Biography.
These more specifically critical and philosophical parts of the work
are distillations of thought from prior fictional shapings of them.
These books, Beyond Life (1919) and Straws and Prayerbooks (1924), de-
fine Cabell's abstract terminology. Clarification of the terminology
necessarily leads to a clarification of the fictional presentation of
the theory. In the novels and stories Cabell objectifies his abstrac-
tions in character, action, theme, place and emblems. The literary
theory is given a multi-faceted, sometimes densely ornamented form.

The consistency of his point of view and form of expression is
unique in American Letters. Both the form and viewpoint have until the
recent work of Arvin Wells, Joe Lee Davis, and Raymond Himelick and
Louis Ruben, Jr., obscured the skeptical serio-comic thought; the
esoteric learning has detracted from the rich humor and the biting but
timeless satire about literary life; the meticulously beautiful style
has softened the lashing wit and the modern temper.

To grasp this vision and in some way to explicate it, I have read
the greater part of Cabell's work. For purposes of this study, however,
I have limited the discussion of what he considered his major work, The
Biography of the Life of Pom Manuel, the Storisende Edition. The fic-

vi

tional works appearing after this collected edition add little to the
literary theory, and the autobiographical works explore the same ground
covered in Beyond Life and Straws and Prayer books. I have read The
Biography in two ways : in the chronological order in which the books
were written and in the order in which Cabell arranged them for the
Storisende Edition. In the analysis I have chosen to use The Biography
as it was finally ordered, regardless of when the individual volumes
first appeared. That form reflects Cabell's final and best shaping of
his fictive vision.

I am grateful to Professor Robert H. Bowers and Director Stanley
West, and particularly to Professor Harry Warfel for his guidance in
shaping the ideas of this dissertation.

/

viii

PART I
INTRODUCTION: TERMINOLOGY AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE THEORY OF LITERATURE

The genesis of Cabell's theory of literature is no more systematic
thfin is Emerson's intellectual growth through his lectures and essays.
As in Emerson's Nature, the basic concepts, terms, and metaphors such as
compensation, beauty, and organisms appear; then, through the various
works, these elements are expanded by example and constant re-examina-
tion. Emerson chose poetry and poetic, organically-developing essays
and lectures to extend his seminal ideas. Cabell chose allegorical-
episodic fiction and the familiar essay. If we look for a tight, profes-
sional philosophical system in Emerson, we find a poet. If we look for a
poet, the philosopher-sage is uppermost. In Cabell's works, the germinal
ideas are presented in the earliest literary effort (see Rothman on the
Congreve essay written during Cabell's college years, 1894-1898), and
they are often repeated, developed, and embellished in all that follows,
achieving their most mature statement in the final volume of The Biography
of the Life of Pom Manuel.

Cabell's literary theory receives its major shaping in Beyond Life
(1917) and Straws and Prayerbooks (1924). After the books which comprise
The Biography, the theorizing, which is usually more informally conversa-

See the unpubl. diss. (Columbia, 1954) by Julius L. Rothman, "A
Glossorial Index to the Biography of Manuel," pp. 1-2.

2
James Branch Cabell, The Works of James Branch Cabell. 18 vols.

(New York, 1927-1930). All references to The Works will appear in the

text.

tional than logically philosophical in tone and manner, continues through
The Nightmare Trilogy and dissolves into anti-climactic querulous argu-
ments in the last autobiographical works, Let Me Lie (1943), Quiet.
Please (1952) and As I Remember It (1955).

Cabell's position is characteristically nineteenth-century roman-
tic in its concentration on the poet-=artist. But he is also much the
eighteenth-century neoclassical figure in his association of art with
some common source--Nature or the Universe. Cabell does not restate
Pope's "Art is Nature to advantage dressed," but he comes close to it
as he explains the auctorial virtues. His theory thus synthesizes the
eighteenth and the nineteenth-century literary philosophies. In The
Biography he plays across the whole continuum from art as a perfecting
of nature used to delight and instruct to art as sincere overflow--a
God-originating force — and finally to the art for art's sake, fin de
siecle theories of Pater, Wilde, Stevenson. He is caught in the central
fight of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries. Indeed he may be called one of the major casualties of that
other "foolish war" between Romance and Realism. He takes sides with
Romance, illusion, dream; he chastizes Philistia, the Realists, social
consciousness.

The theory has as its axis the opposition between the Realist, who
attends to the physical world as it is, and the Romanticist, who imagines
an ideal world that ought to be. The Realist criticizes life by transcrib-

^Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York, 1941), pp. 498-499.

ing it; the Romanticist criticizes life by evading the distasteful,
thereby implying that it could be improved. Cabell does not deny the
universe that the Realist describes; he merely finds that excessive at-
tention to it is not so productive as attention to the illusions which
men live by. The conceptions of the literary theory and the fictional
statements of those conceptions start from this basic antithesis between
the Real and the Romantic.

For Cabell, the universe that the artist lives in supplies the
materials for the work of art insofar as the particular vision of the
universe is reflected in his work. The theory begins with mechanistic
and evolutionary conceptions of man's relationship to the universe, of
the peculiar quality of the poet's relationship to the universe, and of
the kind of association existing between the universe and the work of
art. In Beyond Life. Charteris cogently states this view: "All about
us flows and gyrates unceasingly the material universe, an endless in-
conceivable jumble of rotatory blazing gas and frozen spheres and detonat-
ing comets, wherethrough spins Earth like a frail midge. And to this
blown molecule adhere what millions and millions of parasites just as I
am, begetting and dreaming and slaying and abnegating and toiling and
making mirth, just as did aforetime those countless generations of our
forebears, every one of whom was likewise a creature just such as I am'."
(1» 38-39). In this mechanistic universe man moves and evolves physically
in a certain pattern. The body works on the same philosophical principle
as does the universe:

The thing is rather a parody, in dubious taste. . . .
So far from being you, it is not even really under your

control. Prefiguring it as your residence, you are immured
in the garret, where you have telephonic communication with
the rest of the house. But a house remains quiescent:
whereas this thing incredibly sprouts lawns of hair; con-
cocts, as no chemist can do, its saliva and sweat and gas-
tric juices, with a host of mysterious secretions and uses
them intelligently; makes and fits on a vitreous armor for
the tips of its toes and fingers; builds up and blazes and
renews its sentient teeth; dispatches, to course about its
arteries, innumerable rivulets of blood, with colonies of
living creatures voyaging thereon; and of its own accord
performs a hundred other monstrous activities in which you
have no say. A third of the time, indeed, this commonwealth
which you affect to rule takes holiday, willy-nilly, and you
are stripped even of pretendership by sleep;. Meanwhile the
thing restlessly destroys and rebuilds itself. There is no
particle of it, in the arms and legs or anywhere, which
those hands before you have not lifted and put into the
mouth's humid cavern: nor is there remaining today one atom
of the body you frequented ten years ago. For incessantly
it sloughs and renews and recasts itself, this apparently
constant body: so that you afforded neither a private nor a
permanent residence, but wander about earth like a windwhirl
over a roadway, in a vortex of ever-changing dust. (I, 85-86)

This seeming parody came into existence not through any particular
physical superiority. As a being "it was unpleasantly apparent that man
did not excell in physical strength, as set against the other creatures on
a planet whereon may be encountered tigers and elephants. His senses were
of low development, as compared with the senses of insects; and, indeed,
senses possessed by some of these small contemporaries man presently
found he did not share, nor very clearly understand. The luxury of
wings, and even the common comfort of a caudal appendage, was denied him.
He walked painfully, without hoofs, and, created naked as a shelled al-
mond, with difficulty outlived a season of inclement weather. Physically
he displayed in not a solitary trait a product of nature's more ambitious
labor" (I, 32-33).

Having nothing physical to compete with the universe around him,
he did possess one quality that the rest of creation did not seem to
possess: the power to reason. This reasoning did not acknowledge the
fact of its physical limitation. Instead, "man probably began very early
to regale himself with flattering narrations as to his nature and des-
tiny" (I, 33). Alone in his understanding of his condition, he evolved
on another plane. "Among the countless internecine animals that roamed
earth, puissant with claw and fang and sinew, an ape reft of his tail,
and grown rusty at climbing, was the most formidable, and in the end would
triumph. It was of course considered blasphemous to inquire into the
ground for this belief, in view of its patent desirability, for the race
was already human. So the prophetic portrait of man treading among cring-
ing plesiosauri to browbeat a frightened dinosaur was duly scratched upon
the cave's wall, and art began forthwith to accredit human beings with
every trait and destiny which they desiderated" (I, 33). Man's salvation
is in his refusal to accept the facts his reason shows him about himself
and his universe. Man revolts against the order imposed upon him} the
mode of that revolt is imagination.

Precisely as Plato had revolted philosophically against Democrites'
mechanistic view of the universe, Man, according to Cabell, revolts
against his own knowledge by seeking to push his self-expression beyond
life. The term given to this impulse. Demiurge, derives from this Pla-
tonic revolt. For Plato in Timaeus, the Demiurge is "the world-forming
God who formed or shaped out that which is not Being, i.e., space, 'with
regard to Ideas'." For Cabell, the Demiurge is "the power of romance--

the world shaping and world controlling principle" (I, 14). This "shape
giving principle of all sentient being is artistic" (I, 20). The Demi-
urge is "the universal tendency to imagine — and to think of as in reality-
existent — all the tenants of earth and all the affairs of earth, not as
they are but as they ought to be" (I, 20-21).

Cabell's Demiurge creates what he called dynamic illusions: reli-
gion, myths, politics, common sense, art, patriotism, and realism. The
central impulse producing all of them is the spirit of Romance. "Dynamic
illusions" or "dreams" or "fictions" are the realities, the timeless
truths of the world. They also represent phases in man's cyclical progress,
In defining the relationship between the spirit of Romance and dynamic il-
lusions, Cabell reflects a romantic naturalism: "... the progress of
romance ... is a purely natural force; and in nature, as has been
strikingly observed, any number of times, there are no straight lines.
Art thus does not always go forward, but moves in recurrent cycles, as
inevitably as the planets and tides and seasons, and all else, which is
natural" (I, 100-101). There is, he says, a need for "a continual slight
novelty." I

Cabell shapes a kind of hierarchy or chain of dynamic illusions.
Perhaps these dynamic illusions in their somewhat schematic arrangement
of varying intensities could be called Cabell's value system. In this
scheme he has Charteris, his most Romantic writer-philanderer, arrange
his fictive evaluations of man's mental, social, ethical, religious, and
artistic behavior. The dynamic illusions are like Leibniz's monads —
independently reflecting each other and all reflecting a part of a pre-

supposed harmony, the demiurgic spirit of romance. Similarly the dynamic
illusions may be said to reflect their distance from the absolute crea-
tive form--the ideal Romance. Some illusions are more intensely reflec-
tive than others. All have uses for "man, who alone of creatures apes
his dreams" (I, passim).

The dynamic illusions are interdependent as the emotions, experi-
ence, and the intellect are interdependent, but Cabell views a progres-
sion from the most elemental to the most complex. The following presents
a brief definition in that order:

1. The Dynamic Illusion of Common Sense;

"the belief in the value of doing practical things" (I, 87) gives the
average person a reason for working and attaining creature comforts. That
Cabell places this illusion at the bottom of his scale is made obvious by
the manner in which he characterizes the relationship between the Demi-
urge and the belief or illusion: "to every dupe, of course, romance as-
signs no more than a just adequate illusion; and squanders no unneeded
cunning in contriving the deceit" (I, 88).

2. The Dynamic Illusion of Religion

is "the demiurgic effort to exalt the animal and to woo him away from 're-
alism' "--that adjunct of the lowest dynamic illusion, common sense. (Re-
ligion and myth are synonymous to Cabell, and so they will be synonymous
here.) "Everywhere, as romance evolved the colorful myths of religion,
the main concern of the gods was, less with their own affairs, than with
the doings of men; and everywhere religion was directly profitable to men,

and everywhere romance loaned to this new form of expression that peculiar
beauty — which is delicate and strange, yet in large part thrills the ob-
server by reason of 4-ts unexpected aptness — such as always stamps the
authentic work of romance (I, 119). Cabell was to realize this dynamic
illusion in fictional form in The Silver Stallion, that satirical Acts of
the Apostles, that storehouse of mythologies ranging from Ancient Taoltecs
to Egypt to Virginia-Shintoism.

The culminating development of this dynamic illusion was to be
Christianity — the rtpm-inrgp' s TnaRtprp-fpre. The story of Christ — the whole
Bible romance is "the apotheosis of the Cinderella legend" (I, 120). No
effort of the Demiurge is more delightful romance than The Bible wherein
"there are only two characters. God and Humanity." This cosmic love
affair is caught in the many people of the Bible who are used as "arbi-
trary symbols" which "individually signify very little," but viewed col-
lectively, like so many letters on a printed page, they reveal a meaning,
and it is gigantic. Cabell, discussing Christianity as a fairy tale, sub-
stitutes the Author for God or Jehovah. The Author, God, Jehovah, and
Demiurge are avatars of a single concept.

3. The Dynamic Illusion of Patriotism and Politics
is both dynamic illusion and an anesthetic. "When you consider that presi-
dents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human
beings like you and me and the state legislators and the laundryman, the
thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face. So, here, too, romance
intervenes to build up a mythos about each of our prominent men — about his
wisdom and subtlety and bravery and eloquence, and including usually his

Gargantuan exploits in lechery and drunkenness — so as to save us from
the driveling terror that would spring from conceding our destinies in
any way to depend on other beings quite as mediocre and incompetent as
ourselves. . . ." (I, 176-177). The Demiurge thus protects us with an
anesthetic called patriotism which is also a dynamic illusion for it
allows us to move without depending upon logic — it is a creed "undefiled
by any smirch of 'realism' or of that which is merely 'logical'" (I, 181).
Again to repeat the theme it takes us "beyond life" and therefore is an-
other of "the magnanimous factors in htiman life" (I, 180).

4. The Dynamic Illusion of Chivalry
has as its cornerstone "the idea of vicarship for the chivalrous person
is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and goes about this world
as his Father's representative in an alien country" (I, 36). On this no-
tion of divine vicarship man built his elaborate medieval code. The same
illusion also shaped courtly love codes around domnei or woman worship in
\^ich man found his mistress to be "an ever-present reminder, and some-
times a rival of God" (I, 38). Man's life is assumed to be a personal
transaction between himself and omnipotence and the female held in domnei
is the most earthly emblem of that transaction. "It was a canon of
domnei, it was the very essence of domnei, that the woman one loves is
providentially set between her lover's apprehension and God, as the mobile
and vital image and corporeal reminder of Heaven, as a quick symbol of
beauty and holiness, of purity and perfection. In her the lover views
all qualities of God which can be comprehended by merely human faculties.
. . . And instances were not lacking in the service of domnei where

10

worship of the symbol developed into a religion sufficing in itself, and
became competition with worship of what the symbol primarily represented"
(I, 59-60). For man to imagine this chivalrous relationship between him-
self and God with the worshipped woman as the intermediary is to bring
that relationship about "since man alone of animals can, actually, ac-
quire a trait by assuming, in defiance of reason, that he already possesses
it" (I, 38).

5. The Dynamic Illusion of Optimism;
Writing of Dickens and Thackeray, Cabell reveals the high point of the
scale in this illusion: "... these writers faithfully copied life in
life's most important teaching, inculcating that for persons who honor
the aesthetic convention of 'good' and 'evil' a happy ending impends and
is inevitable, through howsoever unlikely means? For the dynamic illu-
sion of optimism is very thriftily fostered by romance in the wisest, and
in the wise alone" (I, 196).

There is an organic relationship between the illusions brought on
by their dynamic natures. They are not mutually exclusive: the same
words and phrases are used in defining each of them. These illusions are
characterized by a utilitarian purpose because they generate good effects
for man--they are necessary for his survival. Common Sense feeds him and
occupies his hours, gives him other creature comforts. Religion shows
him a point toward which he moves with the aid of its fictions. Politics.
and its corollary patriotism, provides an anaesthetic as well as another
point of externalizing, or objectifying without benefit of "logic* or
"realism". Chivalry and optimism are further sophistications of the

11

forces suggested in Common Sense, Religion (in its primitive, mythic
state) and Politics. The ideas of vicarship and of domnei — (romantic
love and spiritual love in association) are the ideas of something better
evolving as we progress. Man embellishes with his highest illusory forms
those forces from within which drive him on — the Demiurge — the spirit of
romance. Surely it is significant that the last word of Beyond Life is
God, and God and the Demiurge are seen in Charteris' fictive mental
processes to be the same. The idea of dynamism does not foresee an end;
it postulates a kind of cosmic optimism (the wisest of the illusions): a
kind of Bergsonian ever-evolving, flowing elan vital.

The analogue here between the theory of literature and the aes-
thetically oriented cosmology is apparent. The Biography — or any fiction
that can be called art — is itself a dynamic illusion which unleashes (or
should) useful human movement or action. Any work of art has as its
basic dynamism a kind of life force, an existence as it were separate
from the literary artist (who should be analogous to the Demiurge in
Cabell's cosmology). Of course this separation of the illusion from the
spirit that engenders it becomes for the poet the essence of his seeking
for immortality. The force or spirit behind the illusion may be forgotten,
but the illusion itself generates responses which in themselves produce
new patterns of ever- improving illusions.

The literary artist rebels against the universe and the body by
plajing; he seeks diversion from reality by romantic creating. Straws
and Prayer Books, the epilogue of The Biography, is an extended discussion
of this "playing" which produces a work of art. The thesis of that dls-

12

cussion is stated by Charteris before Cabell begins to speak for himself:
"Art, just as Schiller long ago perceived ... is an outcome of the
human impulse to play, and to avoid tedium by using up such vigor as
stays unemployed by the necessities of earning a living. The artist is
life's playboy. The artist, to avert the threats of boredom, rather
desperately makes sport with the universe" (XVII, 12). Cabell expands
this theory of art as play or diversion into recapitulation of the major
themes of The Biography and his literary theory. He re-defines the uni-
verse and man's living in the same manner that he uses in Beyond Life;
then he works out the relationship between the Economic theory and the
play theory, giving attention to the complexities of the artist's motiva-
tions, particularly the novelist's. He develops what he calls a creed
based on the idea of art as a diversion.

In his art the novelist plays with common sense, piety, and death.
The first two are considered to be man-made, and the novelist may be said
to face his own creations, his playing with these guides to man's actions;
but death is the one inevitable fact of existence, and in his playing with
death the novelist may be said to face his creator, rather than one of his
own creations. The novelist, that is, the romantic novelist, plays with
common sense by ignoring it, "for common sense tempts men to be contented
with their lot, to get the most from what is theirs, and not to hanker
nonsensically after the unattainable" (XVIt, 63). To this temptation
the literary artist says "Boshl" "And having uttered it, the artist pro-
ceeds to divert himself by living dozens upon dozens of lives which in
nothing resembles the starveling and inadequate existence allotted him

13

by the mere accident of birth" (XVII, 64). In his aversion to conmon
sense, to acceptance of things as they are, the literary artist is a
wizard, a magician concerned with his own self-expression.

"The literary artist . . . plays with piety" (XVII, 73) by recog-
nizing man's interest in "some cunning, strong, unconquerable rogue"
(XVII, 83) such as Robin Hood, Rob Roy, or Tyl Eulenspiegel. This in-
terest reflects man's desire for the forbidden and his admiration for
those who rebel against law. "Imaginative literature has tirelessly
advocated revolution, by depicting the possibilities of a more pleasure-
giving state of affairs, and in his diversion, the artist has consistently
tended to identify himself with the rogue and the lawbreaker" (XVII, 83).

Cabell further finds the explanation for the Romanticist's inclina-
tion "to glorify the breaker of laws current in the artist's lifetime"
in the failure of society to provide "... any exact or generally
respected status for the artist. . ." (XVII, 84). This failure and the
constant use of reason, which the artist alone is permitted, have led the
artist to find all "human ordering of this world, under all regimes, to
be unsatisfactory" (XVII, 84). Disliking the world he lives in, he
"diverts himself by constructing other worlds, where orderings are dif-
ferent, and to his mind, more approvable" (XVII, 86). In effect, his im-
piety is suggested by his indirect instructions to "the aggregate wisdom
of his fellows, and even of Omnipotence, how to create a more satisfactory
world" (XVII, 86). Content with no condition that he meets in life, the
romantic artists criticizes order, and attempts to impose a better one
through his own imagination. Not satisfied with being discontented, he
sets about not only "to create more interesting persons than nature ere-

14

ates, but to outvie nature by making his creatures durable" (XVII, 92).
To do this, he plays with ageless symbols of man's irreverence, for ex-
ample, Pan or Prometheus, or Satan.

The artist plays with death by acknowledging constantly its inevi-
tability and yet by believing that he purchases immortality beyond the
body with his works. Against piety and common sense he pits the crea-
tions of his imagination and against death he takes an altruistic chance
that his works will receive the acclaim of posterity. He knows implicitly
that he cannot last, but he hopes that his works may. Here Cabell does
not give the audience or posterity much credit, and he says that the
writer

who is sustained by the notion of his books' being perpetual
things cannot, after two minutes of honest thought, believe
himself to be sustained by altruism, nor by any faith in the
superior discernment of posterity. Upon no ground perceptible
to me could reason detect, the instant that reason weighed the
present rate and direction of man's progress, any marked likeli-
hood of posterity's being in anything more logical than is that
* contemporaneous, so huge and so depressingly unimpressed audi-
ence which every artist must perforce condemn. Posterity in
its approach to literary matters would probably muddle forward
as man has always done, upon humanity's time-tested crutches
of hearsay and stupidity. (XVII, 25A-255)

As the artist cannot rely on posterity, so he must also ignore the
attitudes and desires of his contemporary audience. His best work comes
from his playing with his own ideas and his shaping of these ideas ac-
cording to his own plans. His readers may follow the trail that he
blazes and find delight in "the by-products of his hedonism" (XVII, 35),
but the diversion he seeks is for himself and no other. The artist "who
for one half-second during his hours of play with ink and paper considers
anybody except himself is contriving a suicide without dignity" (XVII, 36),

15

Only insofar as he delights and interests himself will he delight and
interest his audience and contribute to the general human happiness.

The artist, like all men, seeks diversion from the universe,
society, and his own physical being; but the artist alone seeks to give
shape to his diversions, hence sharing them with other men for their
diversion. In his play, the literary artist makes sport with common
sense, piety, and death— thus making his diversion a constant rebellion.
But, for all his efforts to achieve immortality through his works, at the
last, all that the artist can be sure of having attained is his own self-
diversion.

In his creation of his work the literary artist acts analogously
to God's creation as described in Genesis. M. H. Abrams has traced the
development of this commonplace analogue from Plotinus through the
Renaissance to the nineteenth century romantic critical theory and into
the twentieth century New Criticism. Cabell consistently reflects this
Neo-Platonic position: the artist is to his work as God was to Adam and
Eve. "The elect artist voluntarily purchases loneliness by a withdrawal
from the plane of common life, since only in isolation can he create. No
doubt he takes with him his memories of things observed and things en-
dured, which later may be utilized to lend plausibility and corroborative
detail: but, precisely as in the Book of Genesis, here, too, the creator
must begin in vacuo" (I, 90). Plotinus had produced this analogue "to
elevate art from the realm of flux and shadows to an eminence over all
human pursuits, in close connection to the Ideas and to God himself. The
artist, from being a craftsman, became (in a momentous new aesthetic

16

metaphor) a creator, for it was sometimes said that of all men the poet

is likest God because he creates according to those patterns on which God

4
himself has modeled the universe." This metaphor is significant because

it both raises the artist above the craftsman and becomes the major pre-
supposition for the theory of art as expression, the dominant theory of
the nineteenth century (Abrams, passim) and the major aesthetic theories
of the twentieth century as developed by Cassirer, Langer, Croce, and
Collingwood, Collingwood discusses this theory in his defense of the
verb, create, and in the prevalence of the God-Artist analogue. "To cre-
ate something means to make it non-technically, but yet consciously and
voluntarily." Collingwood, like Cabell, contrasts the idea of God's
creation to the universe with the artist's creation on the basis of their
respective infinite and finite being. Artists unlike God must have cir-
cvnnstances which enable them to create, as well as "certain expressed emo-
tions and the wherewithal to express them."

Cabell adopts the basic Romantic conception of the artist as a cre-
ator even though he does not ignore the artist-as-craf tsman theories of
Aristotle and Plato. By locating the act of creation within the mind, he
accepts "the concept of art as a mirror turned around to reflect aspects
of the artist's mind. . . ." The Romantic position is "that the content
of art has an internal origin and that its shaping influences are not the

^. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), p. 42.
^R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York, 1958), p. 128,

Collingwood, p. 130.

17

ideas or principles informing the cosmic structure, but the forces in-
herent in the emotions, the desires and the evolving imaginative process

7
in the artist himself." The impulse to create, for Cabell, the Demiurge

or Spirit of Romance, is inherent in man's mind; the dynamic illusions

shaped by this internal force are the substance of man's immortality.

The gadfly of self-expression which stings the romantic artist
forces him away from social virtues, giving him an exaggerated opinion
of himself and making him "avoid all persons whose tastes are similar to
his," and condemning him "to continuous loneliness" (I, 146). The Demi-
urge is very powerful and "so potent and honey sweet, is the allure of
this desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: for all that,
it may well be the contrivance of some particularly sardonic -minded devil:
and beyond doubt, if follow the desire you must, you will be the wiser for
scrutinizing its logic none too closely. You had best yield blindly to
the inborn instinct, and write as well as you possibly can, much as the
coral zoophyte builds his atoll, without any theorizing" (I, 145). This
desire is the only emotion that the creative artist yields to, because he
must become so callous that he observes any emotion "as potentially an
interesting topic to write about" (I, 148). Driven toward immortality to
be attained through his objectified dreams which he has "snared with
comely and fit words," he separates himself voluntarily from ordinary
human intercourse.

The artist subjugates himself to all the demands of his desire. He

Abrams, p. 46.

18

uses his physical self, but the expenditure is worth it, "the game is
worth the candle." The poet's body becomes a battleground wherein "the
human brain is perverted to uses for which, as first planned against
arboreal requirements, it was perhaps not especially designed" (I, 89).
He knows his body is "a cunning and elaborate piece of mechanism . . ."
and "an apparatus wherein something might conceivably be done." With
this loaned machinery "these covetous-minded persons, the creative writ-
ers--the poets, the poietai, the 'makers' — endeavor ... to make some-
thing permanent." This desire "to get enduring increment of his body"
guides "the craftsman in that creative literature wherethrough a man per-
petuates his dreams." (I, 88). He chooses his dreams over his body and
once the dream is written down "its creator may usurp the brain-cells and
prompt the flesh of generations born long after his own carnal loans are
dust" (I, 89).

The alternative choice is the universe and the body as it is, the
acceptance of reason and fact as the sole attention for men. Reason would
have man accept his physical inferiority to all that shares the universe
with him, and to acquiesce to the facts that are everywhere apparent, even
in the mirror. Realism is the name given to this alternative, the enemy
of Romance. It is the constant reminder that men are "mediocre creatures"
(I, 27). The begetting, slaying, abnegating, and toiling of man are its
subject matter; the dreaming is evaded. Realism is the fallacy that "our
mile-posts are as worthy of consideration as our goals; and that the es-
pecial post we are now passing reveals an eternal verity. As a matter of
fact, mile-posts by ordinary [sic] reveal the pretension of a tradesman

19

who believes in advertising, which very possibly accounts for the manner
of our more generally esteemed 'realists* in every field of human action.
So, realism, too, becomes an art of sorts, a minor art, like music or hair-
dressing. 'Realism' is the art of being superficial seriously" (I, 246-
247). Dwelling upon mannerisms of the moment, it misses the truth that
imagination, the power of Romance, would certainly have revealed.

This antithesis between the universe and defiant man's imaginative
self-expression about his place in that universe, is the philosophical
basis of Cabell's conception of the artist and his work. It is also the
basis for Cabell's conception of history and ethics. The literary theory
is never too far removed from the ethical theory; imaginative self-expres-
sion is man's highest development whether in his arts or his religious
systems or his political notions.

The universe and the life within that universe which the poet
makes use of must not control his product, but they are nonetheless neces-
sary to him. Art is derived from the everlasting tension between the uni-
verse as it is and as it ought to be. "'Art ... is an expurgated edi-
tion of nature: at art's touch, too, 'the drossy particles fall off and
mingle with the dust.'" (I, 190). The artist works with his imaginative
self-expression but there can be no separation between his imagination
and his intellect. "Precisely as the sculptor's inspiration must conform
to his supply of marble, so must romance be trammeled by working in the
rarer and more stubborn medium of human intelligence" (I, 125).

The creative process involved in this working of the Demiurge
through the materials of reason and behavior is the central concern of
Cabell's theory of literature. All creative artists must face this

20

choice and in some way reach a compromise between their existence as
artists and their animal natures — the antithesis of "things as they are"
and things "as they ought to be" is reflected in the mind of the creative
writer. The Economist, or elect artist or the truly creative artist makes
his compromise and strives "to create against the last reach of futurity
that which was not anywhere before he made it. He breaks his implements
with ruthless usage; he ruins all that time will loan: meanwhile, the
work goes forward, with fair promise" (I, 94). Inevitably the purchase
price of his body's destruction must be set against the enduring value of
the finished work. The term. Economy, to Cabell is synonymous with great
literature, i.e., the best expenditure of life for art, A high point of
this literary theory comes in Charteris' resume of the auctorial virtues--
the closest Cabell comes to setting forth a kind of poetics for the
Economist. Charteris (really Cabell) is perturbed that Cabell (really
Guy Holt) had thought that he (Charteris) was talking all Walpurgis Eve
about rules for producing novels. Charteris feels that he has been dis-
cussing man, the universe, the spirit, and art. Cabell's attack is solid-
ly on the literary side — the logical weaknesses of the literary theorizing,
but Charteris is appalled that he has talked so long without being under-
stood. Jarred by his failure to communicate, the fictional voice of
Cabell answers t±ie fictional voice of Holt (posing as Cabell) by a
carefully orchestrated coda in which he defines the auctorial virtues as
qualities to be desired in literature because they are not to be found
(or experienced) in life. In the term virtue and in the manner of defin-
ing the qualities J distinction, symmetry, clarity, beauty, tenderness.

21

truth, and urbanity, Cabell suggests the overlapping of ethical and
literary theory.

Through fiction the novelist seeks to distinguish himself, to ac-
quire universality and immortality which is outside his physical, worldly
limitations. "In art it may so happen that the thing which a man makes
endures to be misunderstood and gabbled over: yet it is not the man him-
self. We retain the Iliad, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep that
many question if he ever existed at all . . ." (I, 262). Distinction for
an individual man is impossible to conceive in "the long progress of
suns, whereby is thought to separate the personality of any one man from
all the others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger Omniscience" (I,
262). Art is the only possible means of perpetuity, the one means of be-
ing different from "this throng of human ephemerae and all their millions
and Inestimable millions of millions of predecessors and oncoming progeny"
(I, 261).

Faced with the universe and lacking any knowledge of its intention
and purpose, the writer seeks to impose symmetry and clarity on life to
make it intelligible. The writer revolts against the "tyranny of matter"
— "against life's absolute need of food, and books, and fire, and cloth-
ing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life perish . . ." (I, 263).
His creative effort, his desire for order and explanation in his objec-
tive realization of his dreams, is a desire to alleviate his sense that
life is "all a muddling thought, somehow without any recognizable goal
in view, and ... no explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere
procurable" (I, 264).

22

Beauty is synonymous with perfection, ideal form, or completeness,
which is always just beyond reach. For Charteris, beauty is best defined
symbolically in the life of a butterfly which is "such a graceful ges-
ture: and yet in that its loveliness is complete and perfectly rounded
in itself" (I, 264), The beauty fiction should have is the beauty of
the butterfly's "bright flicker through existence" (I, 264). The beauty
the poet seeks is flawless and he divines that it exists somewhere but
nothing in human life contains or suggests it.

Tenderness in books alleviates the need for likeable people,
people who have "generally distributed qualities which entitle them as a
race to admiration and affection" (I, 266). Honesty, trust, and openness
in dealing with other beings must offset suspicion, posing and conceal-
ment or misrepresentation that characterizes human dealings with one
another. People in books must bring forth "tenderness and caressing
words, in part because they deserve it, and in part because I know they
will not suspect me of being queer or of having ulterior motives . . ."
(I, 266).

Truth, as an auctorial virtue, opposes consciousness of physical
actuality, that "phantasmagoria of sound and noise and color" which may
or may not be illusion. It is man's lot to be "a very gullible conscious-
ness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries." Truth in fic-
tion is "certainty" or a shaping of sensations.

And, finally, urbanity, the highest and rarest virtue, is toler-
ance of the unfamiliar. The urbane person would be alien to the world
as it is because he would be "a mortal open-minded and affable to con-
viction of his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in anything by

23

irrational blind prejudices (I, 267). Urbanity would, in effect, be
compassion, commiseration, and empathy "to that piteous thing called
human nature" (I, 267). Intolerance being the essence of the history
of the human race, the literary artist should reflect absolute toler-
ance—an idealized romantic vision rather than the world as it is.

Cabell's insistence upon intrinsic auctorial virtues in a liter-
ary work is a kind of marriage between the classical and neoclassical
theories of art as craft, as perfected representations of nature, and
the theory of art as expression originating within the artist. The key
event in the shift from craft to expression had also brought the poem
into a more significant position than that suggested by mimesis of "the
mirror of nature." For the Romantic theorist the poem became a hetero-
cosm, a second nature, which must be judged by criteria intrinsic to its

Q

own being. This idea had been prevalent in the Renaissance and it was
to come into prominence again in twentieth century criticism (See Austin
Warren, Rage for Order, 19A8), with the idea of the poem as a heterocosm
there came a new emphasis on the analogy between God and the Artist. If
the poem is a whole cosmos then its creator certainly takes on aspects of
God. Both ideas, the poet as the point of greater interest in critical
theory and the poem as the major critical concern, are synthesized in
Cabell's expressive — objective fictive theory, his notion of imaginative
literature finely crafted.

8

Abrams, p. 262.

9
Abrams, p. 272.

24

The movement of Cabell's thought is a combined metaphysical cos-
mological, ethical, moral, psychological, progression through skepticism
to a final affirmation which does not throw out the skepticism but opti-
mistically accepts the duality of the sensate physical and the illusory,
demiurgic spirit. The act of believing in practical matters, in re-
ligious ritual, in politics, in domnei, in God's love for man recipro-
cated and in the world beyond life — "as it ought to be" — whatever the act
of believing may be is guided by the dynamic illusions. God may be an
illusion; man's relationship to God, man himself may be an illusion, but
there is in Cabell's affirmation an acceptance of the illusions for their
perhaps illusionary worth which he feels exist though he doesn't know they
exist.

The Biography once completed is outside Cabell as its demiurge —
its Author — and he can feel only gratitude for the act of working it out —
of seeing the dynamic illusions, within the work — of reviewing the various
fictions as they now seem to have lives of their own. He believes unques-
tionably that he has "written beautifully of beautiful happenings" which
was his set purpose in 1907 when the young Cabell produced the first book
of The Biography--The Eagle's Shadow. Of course as The Biography is
finished he embellishes (elaborates) this desire into both an ethic and a
theory of literature involving the auctorial virtues to which "romance
directs all the affairs of life . . . , distinction and clarity, and
beauty and symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity" (I, 141).

PART II
FICTIONAL ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF LITERATURE

Character
The major terms and premises of the Cabellian theory of litera-
ture receive continuing development throughout The Biography. Cabell's
fictive world is filled with characters who embody some or all of his
literary ideas and who enrich those ideas through their complex actions
and dialogue. The abstractions are constantly objectified in fictional
terms. It would be a mistake to refer to these personae as only figures
of allegory or walking ideas, however, for they are always much more than
that. Cabell's novels and short stories are composed of adventure and
social comedy intrigue, but they are also augmented with discussions about
literary matters and with actions that have literary significance. At the
center of most of the actions is a poet-hero and closely related to him
there are always women who stand outside the creative act but serve as
catalystic agents in the poet's life. All of Cabell's poet-heroes are
human; some of the female characters are human, some are supernatural cre-
ative figures — gods and demi-gods--who omnipotently set events in motion,
complicate the action, and respond to earthly happenings with intrigue
within their own ranks. The literary theory is an integral part of both
the human and the supernatural actions of the poet-heroes, the women, and
the other-worldly figures,

Poet-Heroes
The actions of Cabell' s poet heroes are governed by three attitudes

25

chivalry, gallantry, and poetry. Chivalry was "an intelligent attitude
in which one spun romances and afforded no meticulous attention to mere
facts . . ." (I, 38). The chivalrous hero considers himself a vicar of
God on earth, and his living is a testing to prove his worthiness for
that illusion of himself. The gallant hero, on the other hand, accepts
"the pleasures of life leisurely and its inconvenience with a shrug" (I,
101). He is "a well-balanced sceptic who comprehends that he knows very
little, and probably amounts to somewhat less, but has the grace to keep
his temper" (I, 102). Finally, the poet-hero is driven by the desire to
make something endurable out of the raw materials of life. Cabell uses
the term, poet, to include all creating or making: literary artists are
poets, God is a poet, and some historical personages, such as Nero, lead
lives that are poetry in the sense that their legends are endurable cre-
ations. To make out of life what will endure is to adopt the poetic
attitude.

The Biography of the Life of Pom Manuel, with its complicated gene-
alogical substructure (see The Line of Lichfield, a genealogical charting
of the intricate familial and ideological relationships of The Biography),
is a fictional presentation of the evolution of these attitudes from
Medieval Poictesme to Modern Virginia. The three major archetypal charac-
ters of the work are Manuel, Jurgen, and Madoc, representing respectively
the chivalrous, the gallant, and the poetic attitudes.

All of Cabell's modern poet heroes are direct descendents of Manuel
or Jurgen, but their spirits share Madoc 's attitude. Manuel begins as a
poet — an image maker— but he turns away from creating to become the

27

redeemer of Poictesme. His rejection of image-making is a rejection of
language for a life of action. "Words are only transitory voices, where-
as man is the child of God, and has an immortal spirit" (II, 126-127).
Manuel discovers that image-makers are a tribe of ugly, rickety and short-
tempered men who despise all people unable to make images. Alone and
miserable in the world of image making, Manuel turns away from Freydis
and Audela and chooses a life of action.

Freydis, there is no way in which two persons may meet
in this world of men: we can but exchange, from afair, ' ., .'.
despairing friendly signals, in the knowledge that they
will be misinterpreted. So do we pass, each coining out
of a strange woman's womb, each parodied by the flesh of
his parents, each passing futilely, with incommunicative
gesture, toward the womb of a strange grave and in this
jostling we find no comradeship. No soul may travel upon
a bridge of words. Indeed there is no word for ray foiled
huge desire to love and to be loved, just as there is no
word for the big, the not quite comprehended thought which
is moving in me at this moment. But that thought also is a
grief—. (II, 129-130)

Manuel's notion of himself as the vicar of God clearly encompasses God's
poetic aspect — if God created life, so can man. Man's attempt, however,
is a failure when he uses words.

Jurgen, we are told, is an ex-poet but we are never shown the na-
ture of his works. He has given up poetry to be a pawnbroker. The poetic
aspects of his life are no doubt those elaborate imaginative excursions
in which he indulges. His imagination — his lies about Manuel's dying in
Poictesme — becomes the basis of Manuel's religious cult in Poictesme.
Jurgen' s poetic imagination is the impetus for the later elaborations
about Manuel's life which become the guiding dynamic illusion for the
country. In his middle age he skeptically accepts the fabrications of

28

the religion he knows to be based on his own childish falsehood. Ironi-
cally, he looks upon the legend he helped shape. Having been deeply in-
volved in the illusion of chivalry as represented in the Legend of Dom
Manuel, he stands outside that legend. Knowing the nature of the fictions,
which guide men, he accepts those fictions for the good they engender
though he is much aware of the actualities which they conceal.

Manuel and Jurgen abandon poetry for chivalry and gallantry and as
the lineal ancestors of all the modern poet heroes in The Biography they
leave some of this basic antagonism between two of man's images of him-
self to their descendents. Significantly, Madoc, the only absolute depic-
tion of complete subservience to the poetic attitude, is not a part of
the genealogical structure of The Biography. He is, however, no less the
spiritual ancestor of the modern poet hero than are Manuel and Jurgen,
Madoc, the poet-hero of Music from Behind the Moon, is the medieval arche-
type of Cabell's modern literary artists, particularly Musgrave and Ken-
naston. In this brief prose work, the poetic attitude is treated with-
out the heavy overlay of allusion and conundrum so typical of Something
About Eve and The Cream of the Jest.

Madoc, a mediocre poet, was dissatisfied with his poems because
they lacked order and "... they strained toward a melody which stayed
forever uncaptured; and they all seemed to him to be thin parodies of an
elvish music, not wholly of this earth, some part of which he had heard
long ago and had half-forgotten, but the whole of which remained unheard
by mortal ears" (IV, 252). The forgotten music, a music perhaps associ-
ated vith a spiritual existence beyond life and time, returns to Madoc •

29

when he sees Ettarre, the witchwoman, and hears her playing on her heart-
strings. Unsettled by discontent with his songs and the otherworldly
skirling "music from behind the moon," he leaves the court in search of
her. Thus begins his journey toward perfect poetic self-expression.

On this journey he meets Jonathas, the Wise, who tells him that
once he has heard the music, there will be no rest for his imagination.
"There is for a poet no defense against their [the witchwomen' s] malice,
because their weapon is that song which is an all consuming fire. Still
as one nail drives out another nail, and as one fire consumes another, so
something may be done against the destroying pain with this" (IV, 254).
Whereupon Jonathas gives the poet a large quill pen "fashioned out of a
feather which had fallen from the black wings of Lucifer, the Father of
all Lies" (IV, 254). Here with greater clarity than in his other fiction
about poets, Cabell emphasizes his belief in the magical and diabolical
origins of poetry.

The quill pen makes Madoc a more successful poet, if not a better
one. He writes patriotic songs, songs glorifying death in war, and op-
timistic songs to comfort the people; but always he hears the skirling
music which derides these songs and reveals the truth. "For always when
his music soared at its most potent he heard the skirling music, which
was all a doubtfulness and a discontent" (IV, 263).

Madoc as a successful, popular poet is trapped by "the puzzle of
all artists," His commercial success wars with his indistinct notions of
what his art could be. There is no audience for his true self-expression,
only his magic potions of comfortable song. "No other person willed to

hear a music which doubtfulness and discontent made overpoignant. They
thronged, instead, to hear the sugared and grandiose music which Madoc
peddled, and which, like a drug, buoyed up its hearers with self-approval
as concerned the present and with self-confidence as touched what was to
come" (IV, 264). Freeing himself from this puzzle he continues his search
for Ettarre, the source of his inspiration. Maya of the Fair Breasts sup-
plies him with a hippogriffin for his journey toward "the pale mists and
the naked desert space behind the moon." This place throbs with Ettarre' s
music: ". . . it seemed the heartbeat of the universe, and the wind that
moved between the stars was attuned to its doubtfulness and discontent"
(IV, 271). He frees Ettarre and returns with her to earth where she
ceases to sing, but he comes to accept his "comfortable and uplifting
songs." Ettarre' s domestic instinct overcomes her music, and Madoc com-
promises his art for security. However, upon Ettarre' s death, the "music
unheard through all the years in which he had held Ettarre away from her
lunar witcheries to be his bedfellow upon Earth . . ." returns. (IV, 286).
Again he becomes a vagabond — "a trifle crazed, a trifle ragged, but ut-
terly satisfied to follow after that music which none other heard" (IV,
287). Of this brief, allegorical tale Davis says: "More concisely and
drastically than any of Cabell's fiction about poets. The Music From Be-
hind the Moon defines the end of poetry's quest as the supernal beauty
described by Poe in 'The Poetic Principle.' Like Shelley's Alastor and
Keats' s Endymion, it conceives this quest as the life long pursuit of an
illusive perfection. Like Poe's 'Israfel' and Rossetti's 'The Blessed
Damozel* it eulogizes the chasm that divides the realm of essence from

31

the realm of matter." Madoc is the purest,' the most unadorned repre-
sentation of the poet in the whole of The BioRraphy. In the starkly al-
legorical presentation of him, Cabell gives his contemporary poet-heroes
a forerunner less complicated by the other attitudes. None of the later
poet-heroes are direct descendents of Madoc, but they share in part some
of his attributes. It is as though Madoc were a distillation of the po-
etic attitude in pure form, in an earlier more rigidly ordered age-
Medieval France. The later appearances of the poetic attitude are com-
plicated by vacant forces within the characters which are no doubt derived
from their lineal forefathers, Manuel and Jurgen.

Cabell examines the modern poet-hero in Beyond Life, Cords of Van-
ity, Something About Eve, and The Cream of the Jest, John Charter is,
Robert Townsend, Richard Harrowby, Gerald Musgrave, and Felix Kennaston
embody various aspects of the poetic attitude in its complex interrela-
tionship with both the chivalrous and the gallant attitudes. Charteris,
Townsend, and Harrowby represent the ascendency of the gallant attitude
over the poetic; Gerald Musgrave represents the failures of the chivalric
and the poetic attitudes and Felix Kennaston represents the ultimate co-
alition of the three attitudes — vicarship, skepticism, and creativity.

John Charteris, the Fairhaven novelist, makes frequent appearances
throughout The Biography as the town's most famous novelist and philander-
er; but his most significant appearances occur in the prologue. Beyond
Life, where he talks about literature all Walpurgis Eve, and in the epi-

Joe Lee Davis, James Branch Cabell (New York, 1962), p. 112.

32

logue, Straws and Prayerbooks. where he is summarily dispatched by Cabell
who has tired of speaking his literary theory through Charteris' charac-
ter.

The format of Beyond Life is a nightlong literary discussion, a
one-sided exchange of ideas between Cabell and Charteris. Charteris
dominates the conversation with what amounts to a series of loosely
constructed essays treating the main tenets of the theory of literature
and illustrating that theory with impressionistic discussion of favorite
writers — Marlowe, Villon, Sheridan, Wycherly, Congreve, Dickens, and
Thackeray. This monologue is in essence a peculiarly involved glimpse
at some biographical details concerning the lives of these men and some
highly opinionated responses to their major works. The emphasis is un-
questionably on biographical details, but the writers are introduced "as
illustrations of his (Charteris' ) theory as to the working code of
romance." The nature of Charteris' critical viewpoint about the writers
is caught in his comments about Christopher Marlowe who in the manner of
a true Economist "wasted health and repute, and even lost his life in
pursuit of pot-house dissipation" (I, 70). He is a writer whose "utter-
ance is lacking in that element triteness without which no work of art
can ever be of general appeal in a world of mostly mediocre people" (I,
73).

As Charteris talks, the reader is aware that the voice is a cre-
ation, a fictional character speaking literary ideas which must be re-
ceived as fictions or illusions. The theory of literature is ever sub-
jected to a kind of Socratic dialogue in which the author appearing as

33

himself attacks his ideas as expressed by one of his characters. Cabell

speaks critically of Charteris' views:

Well, I shall generously say at outset that not in a
long time have I heard a discourse so insincere. It is
an apology for romance by a man who believes that romance
is dead beyond resurrection; and who considers, therefore,
that to romance may be attributed every imaginable virtue,
without any imaginable consequence. It is a tissue of wild
errors, deceitfully glossed with the unreasonableness of a
person who is really in earnest; so that I confess, I was at
first quite taken in, and fancied you to be lamenting with
honest grief the world's lost youth. (I, 245-246)

The warning implicit in this self-examination is that the reader must ab-
sorb nothing too quickly; he must be made aware that the theorist, Char-
teris, may be some wizard — controlled inhabitant of a witches' Sabbath.
(Witching nights are Cabell's favorite settings for literary discussions
and dream allegories.) Charteris is both Cabell's mouthpiece and his best
playing with a kind of mirror image in which he can see himself as a poet:
and criticize the somewhat loquacious reflection.

Charteris' role in Beyond Life continues in Cords of Vanity where
he becomes the major critic of Townsend's literary work.

The Cords of Vanity, the most important depiction of the gallant
attitude as it was in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vir-
ginia, is a satirical examination of the novel writing practices of the
period. The work presents a rebellion against the idealized vision of
the literary artist as reflected in Beyond Life. Robert Etheridge Town-
send, for the most part of the novel, narrates an account of his love
affairs in which he learns "to accept the pleasures of life leisurely and
its inconveniences with a shrug" (XII, ix). During the time of this
growth toward sophistication, he also becomes a successful novelist and

34

short story writer with the encouragement of Charteris.

Charteris and Townsend have several discussions of literary art
in which Charteris is less the talker than he is in Beyond Life, and more
the listener to a point of view which is opposed to his own. In his ad-
vice to Townsend concerning a literary career, Charteris says: "You have
the ability . . . that dances most gracefully in fetters. You will never
write convincingly about the life you know, because life is to you . . .
a series of continuous miracles, to which the eyes of other men are case-
hardened. Write me, then, a book about the past'." (XII, 90). He sug-
gests that Townsend become an Economist, but this is rejected as "abso-
lute and unmoral nonsense." Writing for posterity's acclaim is of no
consequence to Townsend because, in the true spirit of the gallant atti-
tude, he lives wholly in the present. He cannot understand what benefit
is to be gained for the author, such as Charteris, who writes for poster-
ity. He wants "to be read and to be a power" while he can appreciate the
fact that he is "a sort of power, howsoever insignificant." At the out-
set of his career, he plans to write "with his tongue in his cheek,"
which he considers "the one and only attitude ... in which to write if
you indeed desire to be read with enjoyment" (XII, 93).

To support this attitude, Townsend sermonizes in defense of the
best-seller. Unlike all of Cabell's novelist heroes and Cabell himself,
Townsend studies the demand of the contemporary audience and supplies
fiction to suit that demand. He accuses Charteris of overlooking "the
single achievement of the nineteenth century — the relegation of its
literature to the pharmacopoeia" (XII, 93). Fiction has, in this view.

35

as its main purpose to cause relaxation, to uplift by diverting, to in-
toxicate and to hypnotize. The successful writer of fiction that sells
must "avoid bothering the reader's intelligence . . ." by remembering
"the crass emotions of half-educated persons are his chosen keyboard"
(XII, 94). Townsend abhors Charteris' expression, "the dignity of
literature" and replaces it with the most elemental premise of literary
discussion: the book I like is a good book, "A novel which has diverted
a thousand semi-illiterate persons is exactly ten times as good as a novel
that has pleased a hundred superior persons" (XII, 95), To Charteris
writing is "an art rather than a business"; to Townsend this is a silly
position that ignores "the touchstone of any artist" which is

, , . the skill with which he adopts his craftsmanship to
his art's limitations. . . . The most important limitations
in the writing of fiction nowadays is that you have to ap-
peal to people who would never think of reading you or any-
body else, if they could possibly imagine any other employ-
ment for that particular vacant half hour. And you cannot
hope for an audience of even intelligent persons, because
intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with
modern fiction. It is probably ascribable to the fact that
they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so. (XII, 95)

At the outset, then, Townsend sees the main limitation on the fiction

writer's success to be his audience. For his theory the audience is far

more important than the quality of the work or the artist's integrity in

producing that work. His position is directly opposed to Charteris' at

this point, because it insists on a place of importance for the audience

that receives a work of art. His derogatory notion of the quality of

audiences is a direct statement of what is implied in the slighting of

the audience's importance throughout the other discussions of literary

theory. The final sardonic statement of this position makes the

36

commercially successful writer the ultimate artist.

The writing of a frankly trashy novel which will 'sell'
is the highest imaginable form of art. For true art, in
its last terms, is the adroit circumvention of an insur-
mountable obstacle. I suppose that form and harmony and
color are very difficult to tame; and the sculptor, the mu-
sician and the painter quite probably earn their hire. But
people don't go to concerts unless they want to hear music;
whereas people who buy the 'best seller' are the people who
would prefer to do anything else conceivable rather than, in
Cabell's phrase, be reduced to reading. I protest that the man
who makes these half-wits labor on until they see how ' it will
come out' is a great deal more than an artist; he is a
sorcerer. (XII, 96)

Townsend's artist is clearly no Economist and at this stage he seems to
be committing artistic suicide according to Cabell's discussions of the
means of becoming a great literary artist. As well he might, Charteris
condemns the whole argument, calling it a rehashing of "Cabell's pla-
giarized nonsense"; but, he admonishes Townsend to write the book any-
way, perceiving, perhaps, that the true process of writing as he conceives
it will take hold and exclude the drive toward commercial success.

The Apostate, Townsend's first novel, written according to his
formula, is an immediate success; the author calls it "a medley of con-
ventional tricks and extravagant rhetoric inanimate by any least particle
of myself. . . . The book was the most unbridled kind of balderdash" and
"the very current mode of 1900" (XII, 97). His second novel is based on
one of his affairs; it, too, becomes an immediate success. For the third
novel, he briefly plans to write a book in the manner of Mrs. Gaskell's
Cranford, with Fairhaven's provincialism as its subject; upon reflection
he discovers a truth about the relationship between the real world that
one experiences and the possibilities of successfully fictionalizing that

37

world. "For to write convincingly of the persons peculiar to any locality
it is necessary either to have thoroughly misunderstood them, or else per-
servingly to have been absent from daily intercourse with them until age
has hardened the brain cells and you have forgotten what your quodam as-
sociates were really like. Then, alone, may you write character studies
which will be sufficiently abundant in quantities and local flavor" (XII,
165). By the third novel, Townsend's position is clearly moving toward
Charteris' notion about the necessary distance between the literary ar-
tist's experience and his conversion of those experiences into literature.
Obviously Townsend is becoming more interested in the nature of the work,
in the qualities he can attain without considering the audience's taste.
He puts aside the plan to use Fairhaven and turns to the idea of writing
an idyllic novel about young love, a novel in which style is uppermost;
however, he recognizes that he will lose his audience. "But I had some-
how contracted an insane notion that a novel is the more enjoyable when it
is adroitly written. In point of fact, of course, no man who writes with
care is ever read with pleasure; you may toil through a page or two perhaps,
but presently you are noting how precisely every word is fitted to the
thought, and later you are noting nothing else. You are insensibly be-
guiled into a fidgety-footed analysis of every clause, which fatigues in
the outcome, and by the tenth page you are yawning" (XII, 186). The con-
cern for style and the knowledge of its effect on his readers leads to a
position commensurate with that expressed in Straws and Prayerbooks : "A
man writes admirable prose not at all for the sake of having it read, but
for the more sensible reason that he enjoys playing solitaire" (XII, 187).

38

Townsend's idyllic novel never is tested against the audience because the
other party of the affair on which it is based writes her own novel using
the plot.

Townsend's career as a novelist reaches its pinnacle when Charteris
with whom he has disagreed at the beginning of his career praises some of
his short stories. Having moved to a position more closely akin to Char-
teris', Townsend desires to meet the standards set in that critical theory
through a clear f ictionalization of the poetic attitude which achieves
some dominance over the skeptical and worldly gallant attitude.

Gerald Musgrave, an early nineteenth-century Virginia novelist, is
the poet-hero of Something About Eve. He is writing a romance "about the
high loves of his famous ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme," with the main
purpose of giving America "a literature superior to that of other coun-
tries." He alone of the American Musgraves has adopted the poetic atti-
tude to become a member of the clan of Madoc "... who was neither chival-
rous nor gallant, but merely a poet, — a never-idle 'maker'; and to whom
all human life afforded, in the ultimate, only to raw material which his
half-trained imaginings might remake into something more comely, more
symmetrical, and more diverting" (X, x).

At the beginning of the novel, Gerald has lost patience with writ-
ing and has acquired a taste for magic; he escapes from the confinement
of his literary career and his sex-life with Evelyn Townsend by making a
bargain with a Sylan, Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. Sylan wishes to enjoy
the fine sense of physical existence, and Gerald wishes to excel in "the
unjustly neglected art of the magician." For him the source of the great

39

and best words of magic is the Master Philologist who rules Antan with
his wife, Queen Freydis. Gerald and the Sylan exchange places and Ger-
ald's spirit begins a journey toward Antan.

His spiritual journey through the Marches of Antan is marked by a
series of episodes in which Gerald is tempted away from his artistic goal
by his own desires. Mother Sereda, the eternal female principle, sends
her daughters to tempt Gerald. His contacts with these mythical temp-
resses, Eve's daughters — Evadne, Evasherah, Evavan, and Evaine — are thinly
veiled sexual episodes in which the consummation of physical involvement
is checked by his feelings that they represent partial reflections of his
ideal dream woman. Sereda notes these failures but says that they do not
matter because it is not the female alone that words to detain the roman-
tic spirit. "He travels . . . with his assured betrayers and the road he
follows, that also, is lively enough and long enough to betray him in the
end. For he will meet other of my daughters; and if all else fails, he
will meet me" (X, 61). She admonishes her daughters that "one has to
perserve with these romantics, no matter how hard the task may seeml"
(X, 61).

Gerald seems to be aware that he is the source of these dreams of
desirable women; as he observes one of them, he feels that "he is observ-
ing himself and the thing happening to this careful, this well-poised,
fastidious, parched rather pitiable Gerald whom for so many years he has
known." (X, 92). These dream women are representations in each case of
some part of his idealized vision of "unflawed beauty, seemingly not ever
to be found upon this earth" (X, 95). Each of them offers him "an untruth

AO

that shall make him free" to purstie a living "among bright shadows very

futllely" but with happiness.

Faced with this overwhelming and redundant evidence that all human

existence Is governed by Two Truths that govern the Marches of Antan, "we

copulate and die," Gerald optimistically reaffirms his belief In a goal

beyond life and in the divine order and syrnmotry of life.

I am persuaded that in the goal of all the gods there
is a more august power than any which men know of here-
abouts assuredly. For I note the sympathy and compassion
and love and self-denial which human beings display toward one
another, after all, rather copeously. I reflect that every
art is a form of self-expression and I deduce that the artist
who created human beings was prompted in his embodiment of all
these qualities by sheer egotism. He observed these quali-
ties in his own nature: he approved of them: and so he em-
bodied them. No actually reflective person, therefore, will
ever imagine that human life does not go forward toward some
kindly winding up, since none who finds philanthropy in his
own heart can doubt that philanthropy exists in the head of
his creator. (X, 148-149)

His Imaginative powers still unharmed by his physical desire and
his dreams of something beyond sexual fulfillment, Gerald Is finally con-
fronted by Mother Sereda herself. With a magic potion he changes her in-
to a more youthful and more desirable Maya of the Fair Breasts. Tlie temp-
tresses having failed to lead Gerald into an illuslonary phallic world,
Maya resorts to passive femininity and an idyllic domestic life. In a
cottage filled with rose-colored mirrors and with the aid of rose colored
glasses, she seduces him away from his goal--Antan. From the serenity
of Mlspec Moor, Antan seems to Gerald "to be uniformly wonderful." He
feels that in certainty he has a better imaginative vision of happenings
there than could ever be enacted.

His stay on Mlspec Moor (Compromise) is a period in which he

41

questions other figures who move toward Antan. This section of the
novel is a long series of conversations with poets, myths, legends, and
historical persons. His dialogues with Nero, Villon, Odysseus, Neo,
Merlin, and Tannhauser gradually convince him that he need journey no
further. With the desire to achieve Antan on the wane, he attempts to
discover the nature of his goal indirectly. Over and over he asks these
figures why they are going to Antan, but he gets no definite answers.
Gradually, he comes to understand that they go not because they know the
nature of the goal, but because of their own dissatisfaction with the
world behind them. This realization and the quality of his own imagin-
ings about Antan lead him toward the conclusion that such unknown but
Idealistically imagined goals are best left unattained. Antan, he recog-
nizes, is a kind of death of the creative spirit when attained.

The desire to go having been dissolved by both domestic and imagin-
ative contentment, Musgrave Is quickly returned to his library and the
work of chronicling man's sexual behavior throughout history. Through
Sereda's magic his romantic imagination is replaced by a concern for re-
alistic scholarly research into the complexities of the Two Truths. With
his research comes fame and the favors of married women.

None of Gerald's decisions is forced upon him. He is an agent of
his own condition; his final attitude succumbs to his physical needs and
his curiosity. Gerald Musgrave, then, is a characterization of the
literary artist who attempts to push his powers beyond his limitations.
He is doomed from the start by his condition as a man never to attain his
goal, which is his own Illusion. His final acceptance of what he is as a
man deprives him of the poetic attitude, but it restores him to a

42

successful existence as a human being. The condition of being satisfied
destroys the power of Romance within him.

Felix Kennaston makes his first appearance in The Eagle's Shadow
(1905) and later becomes the central figure of Tlie Cream of the Jest
(1917), the climatic fiction of The Biography and the book most completely
devoted to a modern examination of the poetic attitude.

In the course of The Eagle's Shadow's complicated Austen-like plot
of suitors and maidens, Kennaston' s major action is a reading from his
own book, Defense of Ignorance, an attack on truth in art and life: "In
art, the bare truth must, in mere gallantry, be accorded a petticoat, of
paint or of painted goods, to hide her nakedness; and, in life, truth is
a disastrous virtue that we have united to commend and award." (XV, 124).
The conclusion and major point of Kennaston' s book foreshadows the arrival
of the Philistine in Pseudopolis, a major incident in Jurgen. (The
Philistines come with the avowed purpose to explain away all of the Greek
myths and legends.) Kennaston complains that there are "too many inquir-
ies, doubts, investigations, discoveries, and apologies" (XVI, 126).
History and mythology, Indeed all imaginative stories about Joan of Arc,
Aaron Burr, Shakespeare, and Zeus are being dispelled and explained.
"Mythology--the poet's necessity, the fertile mother of his invention —
has become a series of atmospheric phenomena, and the labors of Hercules
prove to be a dozen weather bulletins" (XV, 127). Thus Kennaston is
first seen as a detached novelist who opposes realism in life as well as
In fictional presentation of life. This premise is developed in an essay
that foreshadows the content of Beyond Life and Straws and Prayerbooks.

43

In his later role as the popt-hero of Tlie Cream of the Jest, Felix
Kennaston represents the poetic attitude in modern setting; he is a man
using the raw materials of human life to divert himself and to assure his
own immortality. By means of the Sigil of Scoteia, he lives in a dream
world, ever seeking but not touching Ettarre, the female creative inspira-
tion. In his dreams he is Horvendlle, wandering through history, fiction,
mythology, and folklore. Tlie concentration in this novel is on Kennaston' 8
feelings and sensations and his imaginative working within his dream ex-
periences. The Cream of the Jest explores Felix's dream world and his
self-analysis and self-realization of the nature of literature, reality,
and the universe. It is a self-justifying expression of a creed in which
Felix distills his thoughts from his dreams much as Cabell distills his
notions in Beyond Life and Straws and Prayerbooks.

Chapters entitled "Eppur Si Muove" and "Evolution of a Vestryman"
are the most conclusive statements of Felix's literary theory. As he
moves through history in his dreams, Kennaston comes to understand that
man progresses "through irrational and astounding blunders, whose out-
rageousness bedwarfs the wildest cliches of romance" (XVI, 137). He
sees that man evolves by happenstance toward "greater efficiency and
comeliness" (XVI, 137). Mankind like the characters in his novels is
moved by a puppet-shifter who appears "to seek, at once, utility and ar-
tistic self-expression" (XVI, 137-138). In this world's history, human
inhabitancy is not very important, considering how short a time there
has been life.

Dwarfed by his sense of time and of the brevity of life, Kennaston

AA

poses the question, "Why is Kennaston?" Religion does not satisfy him
because he distrusts the simile that describes the relationship between
divinity and man as that of a father and his children. He rejects the
chivalrous attitude of vlcarshlp — of man's illusion of his relationship
with God. For Kennaston, reality consists of the "evanescent emotions
and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a
second which is passing now, and it is in the insignificance of this
moment precisely that pious people must believe" (XVI, 1A3). Religion
strives to teach that this moment is unimportant and that man mxist live
for something beyond actuality. Art, on the other hand, strives to make
"the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying." Hence art has been consid-
ered irreligious because it performs what religion only promises (XVI,
143-1A4). Man's life is a continual looking forward to something that
will be better tomorrow; his desire is to have life assume the shape of
a romance like those In story-books. Human life is conceived to be "a
distorted mirror held up to literature" (XVI, 148). The hope that
guides Kennaston is that "living might become symmetrical, well-plotted,
coherent, and as rational as living is in books" (XVI, 149). Life, to
Kennaston, has no symmetry and the universe seems "a vast disheveled
horror" (XVI, 149). Life strives toward symmetry, balance, order and
proportion, but nowhere does it attain these goals. Only man can make
symmetry. Kennaston sees an Artist-God--hls fellow craftsman — with a
commendable sense of form and the planet earth as that corner of the
studio wherein God is working at present, and all life as the romance that
God is editing. Life and God are one in this striving; the poet's drive

45

toward symmetry is analogous to the drive inherent in the Universe.

Felix, like God the Artist, falls short of his literary goal, but

he believes in the possibility of ultimate success in his drive toward

perfect order. However, this absolute acceptance of cosmic and literary

optimism as the highest dynamic illusion is modified at the conclusion of

the chapter, "Evolution of a Vestryman" (XVI, 145ff). This modification

of an exuberantly expressed creed occurs in a manner very closely akin to

the closing chapters of Beyond Life. A skeptical novelist-friend of the

hero attacks the position and suggests a less optimistic position. As

Cabell himself appears to challenge Charteris' theory at the conclusion

of Charteris' long monologue, so Richard Harrowby takes issue with Kennas-

ton's doctrines. Harrowby sums up KennastonV? position in a sardonic tone:

To the discerning, it is easy enough to detect, in all
this fantastic theorizing, the man's obsessive love of
ordered beauty and his abhorrence of slovenliness and shape-
lessness--very easy to see just what makes the writings of
Felix Kennaston most admirable, — here alluring him to believe
that such ideals must also be cherished by Omnipotence. This
poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to assume
it was the purpose, and the origin of terrestrial life. Life
seemed to him, In short, a God's chosen form of artistic self-
expression; and as a confrere, Kennaston found the result
praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought,
might be a divine experiment in vers libre. . . . (XVI, 58)

Harrowby as the narrator of The Cream of the Jest finds Kennaston' s theory

too pat — "the shallowest sort of mysticism." He says in rebuttal as a

character within the novel he narrates, "The fatal fault, sir, of your

theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the

universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of

Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston;

it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do} and because

A6

of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn
might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for
no other reason I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a
romance" (XVI, 161-162), Harrowby reflects the skeptical gallant atti-
tude. He is willing to stop with the necessary doubt, accepting what he
cannot know; but Kennaston desires the fabricated illusion of his own be-
lief in the ascendency of Art.

This motif occurs in a more symbolic form at the conclusion of
The Cream of the Jest. Harrowby explains the nature of Kennaston' s dream
symbol, the Sigil of Scoteia, but Kennaston ignores the explanation, say-
ing that it makes not a whit that the romantic emblem is merely a cold
cream jar cap. The dreams, the fictions, are nonetheless real. The fact
that the belief is an assumption without basis in actuality is not so im-
portant as the subjective feelings and the creations aroused by it.
Thought and feeling are communicated by the artist's shaping of his materi-
als, not by those materials themselves, and "all art which strives to make
the moment's sensations soul-satisfying performswhat religion only
promises" (XVI, 144). \

Cabell's theory of literature receives its final and most conclu-
sive examination in the poet-hero, Felix Kennaston. He is the best de-
piction of the poet who understands his relationship with the universe
and the relationship between the work he creates and the creative force
at the center of the universe, Davis has summarized the aesthetic his-
torlclsm of The Cream of the Jest and Kennaston' s view, most nucclnctlyt
"Thackeray in 'De Finibus' tells how the characters of his creation be-
come real people to him, moved into his study, disrupted his household.

47

ignored his convenience, and behaved generally with wills of their own.
If one combines this view of the author's relation to his puppets with
Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination and if one adds the

Butlerian, Shavian, and Bergsonian versions of 'creative evolution, he

2

has the substance of Kennaston's thinking about art and reality." Ken-

naston is Cabell's last poet-hero in The Biography; as such he reflects
the basic tension between the image-makers and the universe. In opposi-
tion to the actualities of the universe and his rationalisation of belief
in fiction or illusion he takes a position opposed to Mantiel's but some-
what akin to Jurgen's and exactly parallel to Madoc's vagabondage. He
does not reject image-making or illusion fiction, but he is not without
knowledge of their intangible aspect. Like Jurgen he understands the
bases of belief, and he values the good results. Like Madoc he strives
toward a perfected self-expression which eludes him. The seeking is more
productive than completion, Kennaston chooses an unattainec^ ordered,
fictive vision of the universe over disordered actuality.

Cabell's variant depictions of the poet-hero emphasize the con-
flicts and the solutions to conflicts of both internal and external na-
ture which confront the poet. Devotion to the poetic attitude is replaced
in Manuel's case by the chivalric attitude; for Jurgen the gallant atti-
tude supersedes the poetic though it does not obliterate knowledge of the
creative past. For Madoc, commercial and popular success as well as
domestication of the dream woman destroy the imaginative drive; however,
the normal course of human existence restores the poet to his endless

^Davis, p. 126,

A8

search. Townsend progresses from absolute supply and demand creativity
toward self-diverting shaping of words. Gerald Musgrave's poetic ambi-
tion succumbs to contentment and finally he even substitutes the study
of sex for sexual involvement; but it must be remembered that his spiri-
tual journey was a quest for magic words not for beautiful carefully
ordered words. Essentially his direction was away from poetry at the
beginning. And finally there is Kennaston, the dreamer-poet, who im-
merses himself in belief and in the historical, mythical, and legendary
materials that are the poet's tools. Optimistically he harmonizes his
ideas of literature with his thoughts about the universe and finds in
both a shared harmony, a common drive toward symmetry, beauty, order, and
truth. The irony of Kennaston' s achievement lies in the fact that his
grasp of this analogous relationship between universe and the creative
imagination brings his productive years to a halt. Like all the rest,
with perhaps the exception of Madoc, having solved the puzzle, having
resolved the tension within himself, he withdraws from his art.

Supernatural Characters
The supernatural characters in The Biography are of two kinds:
those taken from true mythologies and those invented by Cabell. The true
nythological characters usually are one part original to three parts
Cabellian invention. Two of these figures make frequent significant
appearances throughout the work, namely Koshchei and Horvendile. Two
others make less frequent appearances but nonetheless Important contri-
butions: Miramon Lluagor and Donander. Of these four gods or demigods
only Koshchei is a true mythical figure. He is Koshchei the Deathless

A9

of the firebird legend In Russian folklore. These niythlc figures are
part of VThat might be called the Cabellian pantheon of creation myths.
Their relationships to each other are clearly drawn; their influence
among the other characters and in the major actions of The Biography are
as consistently developed a literary apparatus as are Homer's gods and
Alexander Pope's sylphs. Cabell spends as much effort in making them be-
lievable personages as he does in creating the knights and gentlemen of
Poictesme and Fairhaven.

Miraraon Lluagor, one of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion,
is a creator of dreams; he is the lord of magicians, of seven sleeps and
nine madnesses; he lives on a mountain, Vraidex, in his castle, Doubtful
Palace, where he thinks dreams, illusions, and nightmares which he rolls
down the mountain to the people. His freedom in creative thinking is
hampered by his wife's attitude toward such activity. As a continuing
theme, Cabell's female characters, particularly the wives, are Realists
who restrain and paradoxically inspire the creative urge in men. Mira-
mon's desire to free himself of his wife, Gisele, is the trigger to the
main action of Figures of Earth, beginning with Manuel's journey up
Vraidex, ostensibly to rescue Gisele from Miramon, but really through
Mlramon's trickery to take the querulous Gisele away from the magician.

The third book of The Silver Stallion is devoted to Miramon' s es-
capades as a member of Manuel's dissolved fellowship. Miramon is the
second member to deny Manuel. Returning to Vraidex and his nagging wife,
he resumes his "art for art's sake," composing the black and white and
technicolor dreams of mankind in order to help them escape themselves.

50

Miramon's dreams, however, are tinged with skepticism and do In truth
"mirror man." It la precisely this quality In them that Glsele Is op-
posed to, thinking that dreams should only show the good side of man-
kind. So Mlramon, In a fit of temper, wishes her into the middle of last
week. Without Glsele, Mlramon Is miserable and void of creative urges;
domestic tranquility is not conducive to imaginative productivity in the
Cabelllan theory of letters. Miramon's is the artist's characteristic
compromise and acceptance to pursue his art in the Economist's way--mak-
ing the greatest use of the raw materials of self-expression.

Donander is the hero of Book IX, "Above Paradise," of The Silver
Stallion. He "was the only one of the lords of the Silver Stallion wlio
accepted with joy and unbounded faith the legend of Manuel, and who in
all his living bore testimony to it" (III, 251). Upon his death Donan-
der 's spirit is taken by mistake to pagan Valhalla where he marries
Vanadls and fits out a chapel, a place where he can pray for "the second
coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander' 9 soul upon the holy
Morrow of Judgement" (III, 265). For the Aenseis in Ydallr, Donander
becomes the Man-God, Donander Veratyr, an Ans of mature standing, one
of the Aenseis,

After a while in pagan eternity, Donander sees one of his brothers-
in-law, Koshchel, playing a "droll-looking sport" (III, 266). Vanadls
teaches Donander how to play; he begins to create and populate worlds by
his handicraft. Thus Donander begins his demlurgy with an Egyptian cre-
ation myth, Kam and Khjrpera. His skill increases as he indulges in
demlurgy, until he merely has to desire a world to have it come into

51

existence. In this mnnner he creates a universe of planetary systems

(III, 268) while he awaits Manuel and Judgment Day.

Sidvrar Vafudir, the Weaver and Constrainer, Father of Vanadis

(the Father and Master of all), comes to stop Donander's excessive world
and universe making. To do this he shows Donander that all the worlds he
has created worship him, Donander Veratyr, as a god, and fight over the-
ological differences about their belief in him. Sidvrar also shows
Donander that the Earth is gone, that Jehovah has long since stopped
playing with it and he admonishes Donander to stop his world making be-
cause all of the noise these believers send out are ugly and unbecoming
for an Ans of Donander's rank. Donander, in supposed contempt for these
creations and the Insects which inhabit them, wills them gone. Sidvrar
closes the oval window on the universe for good and Donander becomes "a
lonely and uncompr eh ended immortal among his many peers" (III, 276).
But, as soon as the King and Father of the Aenseis leaves, Donander re-
turns to his chapel to worship Manuel and to await his coming and Judgment
Day. To his mind all that Sidvrar has shown him is "illusion planned with
some evil spirit's aid to tempt Donander away from respectability and the
true faith" (III, 277).

Significantly, just as novels are created by the Cabellian novel-
ist characters, so Donander creates universes as play, as a self-divert-
ing, self-expression. The war Ids like the fictions are "imaginative self-
expression which have 'no purpose, no particular end for the creation ex-
cept play, self-expression, or self-diversion" (III, 277). The Demiurge,
here represented by Donander Veratyr, creates dynamic illusions which are

52

worlds and universes and planetary systems but, he has a human heart
which makes him a devout believer in one of these dynamic illusions, the
legend of a redeemer, of hope and salvation for mankind as well as the
Gods or Demiurges. Like Felix, Donander, though he is aware of the illu-
sionary nature of his creations, chooses to believe even as he stops cre-
ating.

Koshchei, Donander' s brother-in-law, is the creator of "things as
they are." He is the ultimate Realist in The Biography and he appears
almost as frequently as Horvendile, the diabolical author of the Romantic
events. Koshchei, a familiar figure in Russian folklore, appears most
importantly in Jurgen and The Silver Stallion. The Heaven which Jurgen
ascends to is the Heaven created by Koshchei after Jurgen' s grandmother
Steinvor's concept of what Heaven ought to be like. The ideas for heaven
were taken from Revelation. The Hell Jurgen visits was also created by
Koshchei, in this case, after man's guilt-ridden dreams of his own punish-
ments. From these two examples it is apparent that Koshchei is an un-
imaginative creator, a realist bounded in his making by what is.

In the last episode of Jurgen, the hero faces Koshchei as "the
manager of the cave" — a cave similar to Plato's. Here Koshchei brings
back all of Jurgen' s dreams to tempt him again, but Jurgen rejects these
phantoms: Guinevere, Anaitis, Helen and Death. So, reluctantly, Kosh-
chei returns Jurgen' s wife. Dame Lisa, as "the voice of Judgement."

Koshchei' 8 power as the creator of the world is threatened in Tlie
Silver Stallion. When the rogue Miramon knocks the bees of Toupan off
their blackcross, the cosmos that Koshchei dominates is disturbed and the

53

Old Ones vtHo superseded him are awakened, Toupan, Guaracy, and Jacy
begin to stir, threatening the harmony of the universe. Koshchei's
agents, the Star Warriors and the Wardens of Worlds, beg him to do some-
thing, but he refuses. As each bee is knocked off Koshchei's power
weakens and suns melt; but the Realist, Koshchei« has absolute faith that
the world he has made will work as he has intended it to work. Miramon's
desire for his wife causes him to wish both her and the bees to be re-
stored. Wlien the bees return, the Old Ones settle into their places and
Koshchei's rule is complete once again. The essence of the man and woman
relationships, sexual desire and domestic regularity , overcome any threat
to the universe that he has patterned after his ideas of flesh.

Koshchei's most frequent activities as a supernatural version of
the realistic literary artist are passive; as a craftsman his success
seems to lie in having made an absolutely predictable world peopled by
absolutely predictable beings--a sexually dominated real world which be-
haves mechanistically. He reduces the romantic dream creators to flesh
by the reminder that they have since creation been flesh and no more. He
uses man's self-punishing guilt, which is inherent in the flesh, as his
main source of inspiration for man's end — Hell. Koshchei's omnipresence
is assumed by the world as it is, a world without the auctorial virtues
of fiction. Like Death, Pan, the Brown Man, and Janicot, frequent sym-
bolic characters in The Biography, Koshchei is dull but powerful, a con-
stand reminder of decay and of the strengths and weaknesses of the flesh.
Like the Realist female characters, Sereda, Maya, Gisele, and Niafer, he
sustains the world by expecting no more of it than was in the original

54

creation, itself no more or less than colorless, imperfect, intolerant
clay.

Except in Jurgen, where he is identified with Koshchei and Kosh-
chei's realism, Horvendile, the diabolical romantic demiurge of The Bi-
ORraphy, is Koshchei' s opposite and, by far, the most complex creator-
artist, fictional mythic character that Cabell created,

Horvendile' s first appearance in the Biography is as Orven Deal,
an off-stage character in The Eagle's Shadow who sends a villain, Cock-
eyed-Flinks, to wound the hero, Billy Woods, and change the course of the
plot. Kennaston, who later shares Horvendile' s identity, makes his first
appearance in this novel.

Horvendile makes a brief appearance in Figures of Earth, as Grand-
father Death's companion and as the prophet of Manud.' s coming experiences.
After Death takes Niafer away, Manuel has a discussion with Horvendile
who tells him that he will lose everything and will at the last detest all
human wisdom. To Horvendile the whole of the place, the action, the char-
acters seem things that he has imagined and all the world appears to him
to be only his notion. As the internal author of The Biography Horvendile
expands his ideas of the fiction into a philosophical discussion. Man's
seeking for success is "but the stirrings of an ape reft of his tale, and
grown rusty at climbings, who yet feels himself to be a symbol and the
frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that is not home." (II, 39).
Man employs himself stirring "blunderingly, from mystery to mystery, with
pathetic makeshifts not understanding anything, greedy in desires and
honey-combed with poltroonery, and yet ready to give all, and to die

55

fighting for the sake of that undemonstrable idea, about his being
Heaven's vicar and heir" (II, 39). In this manner Horvendile sums up
the basic romantic-naturalism discussed in Part One of this study.
Essentially he restates the central collusion of man's dynamic illu-
sions and his natural condition — the dreaming ape. On this combined
note of literary theory and world view, Horvendile instructs Manuel as
to the means of attaining his desires. His other appearances in this
novel are silent, the most notable occurring as Manuel's saga begins
again by the Haranton, near the worm-eaten cross and the two stones:
those Christian-Phallic emblems of his redemptive nature, Horvendile' 8
presence at this scene reminds us that Manuel holds Poictesme in liege
to Horvendile--the auctorial overlord of Tlie Biography.

In The Silver Stallion Horvendile' s role is that of liege lord and
fictive author of the events. He sends the Fellows of the Stallion to-
ward adventures which he has foreordained. In Book One he sends the
members of the dissolved Fellowship in different directions to storm the
fortresses of other Redeemers and to replace those fortresses of myth
with Dom Manuel's legend. This dispatching of the knights occurs in a
Chapter suitably entitled "The Economics of Horvendile." Being the chief
myth maker or illusion shaper of The Biography, Horvendile as the Demiurge
has his role sharpened by the fact that it is he who controls the shaping
of the new dynamic illusion, the life of Dora Manuel, which is the sub-
stance of The Biography. He is the supernatural Economist author, making
the best use of the raw materials ordered by him in a work of art.

Characteristically, Horvendile' a next appearance in The Silver

56

Stallion comes at the conclusion. He appears to dispel women's disngree-
ment over Manuel's true nature. His statement to them is a cogent repeti-
tion of Cabell's basic view of mankind and the necessity of illusions or
fictions: "So does it come about that the saga of Manuel and the sagas of
all the lords of the Silver Stallion have been reshaped by the foolishness
and the fond optimism of mankind; and these sagas now conform in every-
thing to that supreme romance which preserves from insanity. For it is
just as I said, years ago, to one of these so drolly whitewashed and en-
nobled rapscallions. All men that live, and that go perforce about this
world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight,
have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer,
and about the Redeemer's power to make those persons who serve him just
and perfect" (III, 293). Niafer, the preserver and developer of the
legend of Manuel, turns away from this skeptic with the same resolution
that Donander had when he turned away from Sidvrar. Horvendile vanishes
again, having spoken the broadest view of man's role in his own fictions
or illusions.

The metamorphosis of Horvendile into Felix Kennaston, the poet-
hero of The Cream of the Jest, is the climactic fictional point of The
Biography and of the theory of literature. Horvendile describes him-
self before he is transformed into Kennaston of modern Lichfield! "There
was once in a land very far away from this land — in my country — a writer
of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed
ctJBtom of tny country, be pretended to translate from an old manuscript
written by an ancient clerk — called Horvendile ... I am the maker of
that romance, this room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside

57

without, Is but a portion of my dreams, and then? placps have no existence
except in my fancies" (XVI, 27). Tlie remainder of Horvendile's life in
The Biography is as the self-analyzing dreamer-poet, Kennaston.

Horvendile is both god and man, creator and author, fate and im-
probability, critic and philosophical commentator. He is a skeptic and a
disrupting force who works within the fictional patterns. In brief ap-
pearances he sets some of the novels in motion and he resolves other ac-
tions in unexpected and illogical ways. He may be pure spirit or force,
a real Demiurge; but he is always described as red-headed and constantly
attended by the perfect woman, Ettarre. He also may be one of Felix Ken-
naston's dreams about his romantic activities in past ages. Frequently
he is called the Author, indicating he is the major Artist-as-God charac-
ter of The Biography. He is the gadfly to all the idealistic and befud-
dled heroes of The Biography. He is an ally to Grandfather Death and,
perhaps, the creator of Koshchei, the supreme Realist. He is the perfect
embodiment of romantic naturalism, the guiding wizard of the skeptical-
optimism, which is Cabell's hallmark. In his duality as Kennaston, he is
the personification of the poetic attitude.

Cabell's supernatural characters are not, literally speaking,
literary artists with the exception perhaps of Horvendile wJio associates
himself specifically with the literary artist's imagined and controlled
world. They are "makers" or poets in the Greek sense and as such they
reflect the same creative processes that are expressed by the literary
artists of Poictesme and Modern Virginia. These mythical characters cre-
ate at a cosmic level with worlds and the worldly poet-heroes mirror these
supernatural creations in their shapings of words into novels, poems, and

58

plays that are analogous to the created universe.

These supernatural creators of Tlie Biography are embodiments of
what Cabell considers the archetypal patterns of poetry. In depicting
them, he can shape his theory of literature on a more allegorical and
hence more complexly philosophical plane. He can examine the God-the-
Artist or God-the-Poet analogue by creating Gods and demi-gods such as
Horvendile, Donander, Koshchei and Miramon Llugor who are transcendent
but also imminent forms of artists. They, too, create in acts of imagina-
tive self-expression. Koshchei is the realist of the cosmos; Donander
and Miramon are the romantic makers of worlds and dreams; and Horvendile
is the skeptical, diabolical, romantic shaper of lives and actions which
are the contents of The Biography. Cabell uses these mythical makers to
suggest that the universe and Tlie Biography are far too complex to have
been generated out of one creative imagination.

Women
Cabell's female characters generally reflect a central paradox of
his literary theory: the destructive and inspirational necessity of the
female in the poet's life. Woman for Cabell's poet-hero is an ideal to-
ward which he moves and a force wliich restrains his imaginative powers.
The sexual impulse and its object control the worlds of actuality and of
fantasy. Though the ideal woman may be the poet's major inspiration, she
is, if attained, the agent of destruction for that inspiration. In the
flesh or in the dream, Cabell's women are realists or anti-romantics.
If for a moment Guinevere, Anaites, or Melior seems the perfect woman,
proximity reveals that the essense of womanhood is realism. Helen alone

59

of all Cabell's female figures remains an emblem of untarnished beauty
and symmetry; Jurgen knows that to touch her would be to destroy this
dynamic illusion out of the classical past.

Two classes of women populate Fairhaven and Poictesme: the
dreamed witchwomen and wives. The fantasy women are as frequently
corrupters of poetic expression as they are its inspiration. Wives,
on the other hand, are poets' necessary associations, perhaps even more
necessary than the fantasy women. Consistently dreamfigures disperse
the imaginative world in witch-like conjurations of illusory sex and
domesticity. But wives challenge poetic illusions with common sense.
The successful poet-figure traverses both fantasy and actuality: Mira-
mon, the dream-maker, achieves a harmony between his own self-realization
as an artist and his wife, Gisele's, grumbling disapproval of his art.
Jurgen, Manuel, and Florlan give up the dreamworld for domesticity. An
archetypal Penelope-figure and the duties of home await every poet-ad-
venturer after his imaginative sojourns with the Circes, Didos, and Nau-
sicas of his dreams.

Cabell's witchwomen are derived from myth, fiction, and history:
Ettarre and Guineveve are derived from the Arthurian materials. Freydts
is Germanic; Sereda, Russian; and Anaites, Greek. Melior and Melustne
are French fairy tale and folk characters and Alianora is based on
Eleanor of Acquitaine. Each, however, becomes a complex allegorical
figure in Cabell's fictive theory of literature. Of these the most im-
portant are Ettarre, Freydls, and Sereda.

Ettarre, Manuel's third daughter, is the constant companion of

60

Horvendlle, the all-controlling fictional author of The Biography.
Horvendile says that she is Helen to him (VI, 214). She is the epitome
of the Cabell witchwoman who beguiles the poet toward creativity and
destruction. In her physical form she is illusive, "white-limbed and
like a living mist" (IV, 253) in the twilight. The Norns have condemned
her to live in the Waste Beyond the Moon for so long as her poisonous
music lasts (IV, 254). Her music inspires Madoc, the poet, to perfect
his singing. After succumbing to domestic life with the poet, she dies.
His inspiration gone, Madoc places his pen in her hand saying that he
will write no more songs. Charteris, in Beyond Life, associates her with
both Circe and Melusine, witchwomen who dwell in "a secluded land which
is always less glaringly lighted than our work-a-day world shows at noon-
tide" (I, 54). For Horvendile she embodies all he "was ever able to
conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, and she is "that
ageless, lovable, and loving woman long worshipped and sought everywhere
in vain by all poets" (XVI, 10). In a typical Cabell internal footnote
Horvendile lists all of Ettarre's appearances before great poets of the
past: she was Helen to Homer, Calypso to Odysseus, Antigone to Sophocles,
Bombycan to Theocrites, Isolde to Mark and Tristan, Medea to Jason, Es-
clairmonde to Huon. Indeed, "all poets had had fitfull glimpses . . ."
(XVI, 11-12). She has also taken part in the lives of powerful men who
have lived with poetic intensity: Cromwell, Mohammed, Richelieu, Tam-
burlaine, and Julius Caesar (XVI, 183). Cabell obviously thinks of her
as the feminine essence — enigmatic, witch-like, beautiful, disarming,
crafty, fickle— which survives all ages. Though her fleshly forms may

61

be destroyed by domesticity her spirituality is timeless and her life
with any poet is only a fragment; "for her story is not lightly to be
ended ... by the death of any woman's body which Ettarre is wearing;
nor is her music making ended either . . . , no matter to what ears time
and conformity may have brought deafness" (IV, 288).

Significantly, Ettarre is the only figure in The Biography who
is not "debunked" by Horvendile as an unworthy, manmade illusion. She
is his guiding illusion and one of Cabell's major character types--the
witchwoman.. No other figure in his allegories is quite so absolute, so
unchanging in form and position. He conceived of her as the spirit of
all historical and literary seductresses. Like the archetypal artist,
Prometheus, whose spirit of rebellion passes from poet to poet, the
witchwoman is a constant in the lives of poets, in their works, and in
history.

Mother Sereda is another form of absolute female presence. She,
like Koshchel, is a character in Russian folklore. She shares one qual-
ity with Ettarre: a variety of avatars. Ettarre appears as herself
throughout The Biography and references are made to her past involvements
in poetic creativity. Sereda, however, appears in many forms throughout
the work, sometimes changing from shape to shape in one volume as new
shapes are demanded by the situation. As Eve she is man's living on
earth; as the young Maya, she seduces poets away from their purposes
into sex and domesticity. Sereda rules the middle of the week, Wednes-
day, and all things blue (VI, 40). She is the embodiment of destruction,
discoloration, and contentment. She possesses "the secrets of remunera-

62

tive mediocrity in the learned professions, in truth telling, in uphol-
stering, in the removal of mountains into the sea, in the erection of
bridges over any impassable place, in the preparation of rose-colored
mirrors, in criticism, in oratory, in jurisprudence, and in the safe
interpretation of Holy Writ" (X, 168). Her sisters, the fates, "nibble
at temporal things, like furtive mice: she devastated, like a sandstorm,
so that there were many dust heaps where Mother Sereda had passed, but
nothing else" (VI, 35-36). As Maya she is one of those who guard the
way to Antan (VIII, 155) and makes the poets wear rose-colored glasses.
She is "a placid, stupid rather dull woman" wlio thinks that contentment
is all. The desire of poets and gods to create splendor and to perform
tremendous feats is foreign to her. Her great lover, the Adversary, or
Satan describes their relationship: "We two who began in the Garden to
contrive for the happiness of men, and to be speaking always for the real
good of men, — yes, certainly, our work is hard and endless. For men stay
romantically minded creatures who aspire beyond my kingdom. Yet we do
not despair" (X, 283).

Sereda, Maya and Aesred are avatars of the same idea: the female
rulers of "things as they are." They are the illusions of contentment
and compromise which can seal off the poet's creativity. Like Circe,
Maya reduces men to animals by nurturing their animalistic traits:
sexual fulfillment and physical security. Sereda and Aesred are more
ominous and less attractive versions of the same character. Both bleach
life and color out of all things and turn men into "useful domestic ani-
mals" (X, 155). From Eve forward this destructive, bleaching quality

63

of the female has had as strong an influence as has the witchwoman's
sorcery. Ettarre and Maya are not the same, but neither are they com-
pletely divergent; both are dynamic illusions or fantasy figures which
fade in and out of the Cabellian herd's dream life.

Freydis, another variation of the witchwoman, has been the Queea
of Audela and the guardian of its fire, but she becomes the Queen of
Antan. Her exile from one kingdom to another is a shift of her power
over truth beyond life's shadows to control over the yesteryear of myths
and poetry. In Antan she possesses "a mirror which must, they say, be
faced by those persons who venture into the goal of all the gods of
men--the Mirror of Hidden Children" (X, 163). This mirror reflects
images which are "unclouded by either good or evil" (X, 11). Good and
evil being man's first major dynamic illusions, this mirror must show
"the word as it was in the beginning." Freydis is desirable, inspiring
and destructive like the other witchwomen; but as a gray witch she is
neither the ideal female nor is she its negation. As a major figure of
the theory of literature she is the most vascillating and enigmatic be-
cause of her relationship with the two allegorical places, Audela and
Antan. Her realm is at once physical--she is seduced by men of action,
Manuel and Florian — and spiritual — she has possessed the fires of great
poetic inspiration and she comes to possess the all enveloping misty past
which is the end of all poetry.

Another set of dream women are of literary and historical origins,
for example: Guinevere, Helen, Melusine, Melior, Allanora, and Ysabeau.
Of these, the most important to the literary theory is Helen, who repre-

64

sents classical perfection in womanhood, Melusine and Melior are figures
of French literature and folklore, characters from the courtly love tra-
dition of the troubadors. Guinevere is emblematic of the collapse of
chivalry. Alianora and Ysabeau are fictionalized historical personages,
Eleanor of Acquitaine and Edward II* s wife, women who have sacrificed
their female qualities for political power. Jurgen's dream of Helen and
Helen's image as the epitome of beauty and desirability remains intact;
he refuses to possess her physically because he cherishes the power of
her illusion. He refuses to make Faust's and Paris' s mistake. Having
possessed Guinevere, Anaitis and Chloris, he knows the consequences of
the physical to be disillusionment. Unlike Faust he refuses Koshchei's
offer of any perfect woman, thereby accepting life "as it is" while re-
taining his ability to move beyond life in the dynamic illusion of per-
fect beauty and symmetry, Helen.

The wives of the heroes are not dream women or witches; they are
helpful antagonists to the poet's inner life. As essential catalysts
for the poet's physical existence they serve a dual purpose in Cabell's
literary theory. Niafer protects Manuel's image while he lives and de-
velops a religion based on that life after his death. Gisele chastizes
Miramon for the sexual aspects of his dream-making; he uses the last two
of three wishes to send her away and to recall her when he discovers that
her absence unsettles the necessary harmony of his household. Lisa
grumbles constantly, but Jurgen chooses life with her over all the
romantic dream women. Saraide, Kevin of Nointel's wife, cuckolds her
husband, and ridicules his attempt to acquire all knowledge, but remains

65

with him to provide the truth that tempers his learning. Each wife
represents the dynamic illusion of common-sense challenging the dy-
namic illusions, chivalry, art, optimism, and knowledge.

Niafer shapes the religion of Manuel, but she does not waste real
jewels on Manuel's tomb. Gisele nags about Miramon's dreams, proposing
less skepticism. Saraide questions all knowledge with a definition of
life as a ". . . pageant that passes quickly, going hastily from one dark-
ness to mother with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in
it. . . . But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors
in it; and I have loved their youth and their high-hear tedness, and their
ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kevin, about their own im-
portance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them— while
you were peddling after, of all things, the truth" (III, 207).

Her statement is that of a romantic naturalist: the world view
does not shatter her belief in the truth and enjoyment of the dynamic il-
lusions necessary to life. Her "economics" is the same as the Economist
poet's theory of literature: to make the best use of the raw materials to
move beyond life. Each of the wives retains her belief in the basic
dynamic illusions, ignoring the dream-wrought skepticism of her poet hus-
band. Each of them becomes in some way the sanctuary for the poet out-
side the fantasy world. Not fully understanding the nature of the hero's
life, each nurtures it with healthy antagonism and protectiveness. Like
Priscilla Bradley Cabell, the model for all of them, they encourage the
poet indirectly and keep his skepticism in check with regular church
attendance, domestic harmony, and children. It is this image of the

66

poet's wife that correlates with his idea that poets are childlike per-
sons who play at elaborate make-believe for their own diversion and need
constant attendants.

The women--wives or witches--of Cabell's novels are essential to
his fictive vision: the paradoxical interdependence of existence and
dream, the world "as it is" and the world "as it ought to be." "Man
alone plays the ape to his dreams"; his greatest dreams are of women and
his fantasy playing is supervised by women.

Woman, in her various aspects as conceived by Cabell, occupies a
position of importance in all of the attitudes which guide men. In
chivalry she is the intermediary worshipped figure who symbolizes God's
spiritual presence on earth. In gallantry, she is the object of man's
living within the bounds of his physical limitations; she is not wor-
shipped but coveted by the gallant hero. And to the poet she can be
destructive, inspiring, and compromising; the poet may worship her, covet
her body, or idolize her as the embodiment of perfection in art. Either
possessing her or worshipping her may destroy his creative drive toward
immortality in literature. Idolization of her as the unattainable sjrmbol
of symmetry, order, and beauty results in the best poetry. As a dream
she inspires what she cannot engender as a physical actuality.

As he depicts the various aspects of the poet's inner being by
creating a widely differing group of poet-heroes, so Cabell includes many
women characters who have great ideational significance in his theory of

James Branch Cabell, As I Remember It (New York, 1955), p. 42.

67

literature. Woman-consciousness is an aspect of all the attitudes
treated in The BioRraphy and by far the most complex presentations of
her occur in relation to poets.

The Allegorical Journey and Thematic Pattern
Beginning with The Cream of the Jest (1917) and culminating in
five major works of the next decade — Jurgen, Figures of Earth, The High
Place. The Silver Stallion, and Something About Eve--Cabell uses one
fictional pattern with variations. The literary theory, which increases
notably in these books, is developed as allegorical journeying of the
hero's spirit or dream form. Cabell refers to this quest journey as "the
true formula": "It is the formula of the Odyssey, the formula of picar-
esque romance, and of all fairy stories properly equipped with quests and
the undomitable third prince. It is, of course, precisely the one formula
which cannot ever lose its charm so long as men retain that frame of mind
which seems coeval with recorded history, of being bored by the routine
of their daily living" (XVII, 54), For his purposes, this form offers a
very suitable and logical construction in which he can arrange a variety
of thoughts and symbolic actions. He courts the rather obvious compari-
son between his work and The Odyssey, Pilgrim's Progress, Gawain and the
Green Knight, the Divina Commedia, Faust, and Tom Jones because he wishes
to echo the color, tone, incident, and literary significance of these
classical journeys. No doubt he shares Joyce's and Eliot's mythopoetic
conception of literature, a critical vision which came into being during
Cabell's most productive period, the 1920' s. Cabell has in the five major
novels of this decade examined the djmamic illusion, the Demiurge, and

68

the auctorial virtues from different points of view.

Tlie Cream of the Jest is a series of dreams interspersed with
discussions of dreams and literature. In effect the book begins in
Kennaston's dream of Horvendile, and then moves back and forth from
fantasy to actuality, comparing the two worlds and eventually emphasiz-
ing the more productive fictions of dreams. The pattern of action in
the book stresses the interdependence of the imaginative world and the
physical world.

Kennaston's dreaming is stimulated by a dynamic illusion, his be-
lief in the Sigil of Scoteia, The novel's zigzag movement is toward a
unification of the two halves of the Sigil and Harrowby's explanation
of that emblem. The novel's climax is in a philosophical decision:
Kennaston's wife dies at the moment he discovers that she has the other
half, he ends his writing career, and he defines the importance of be-
lief which is based on illusion. Separate dreams of encounters with
fictional and historical personages are the episodes which lead Felix to
self-realization and to acceptance of his physical existence. As is so
frequently the case, the hero's journeying brings him back home. Ken-
naston's acceptance is at once a thematic resolution of his life as a
husband, an artist, and a creature of the universal order. Harrowby's
explanation of the Sigil acts in the plot as a denouement faintly sug-
gestive of a detective unraveling the facts in a murder mystery — all of
the illusions are explained away. The Sigil has lost its use as the
poet's looking glass or Proustian madeleine, the entrance and impetus
into a controllable fictional world.

69

As a prelude to the period of the mature comedies, The Cream of
the Jest' s structure is Important because it hints at the more linear
progressions to come. Cabell seems to have turned away from the inter-
mingling of dream and reality to the journey in which the hero moves
through increasingly more complex allegorical episodes. The idea of a
plotted progression toward acceptance suited his purposes so well that
he used it in four succeeding novels and in most of the episodes of The

gilYe^§Ea.i-iton.

Critics consider Jurgen the prototype of Cabell's mature comedies.
In it the allegorical quest or dream journey is worked with a control that
Cabell improves as he approaches the completion of The Biography. Jurgen's
Walpurgisnacht journey is composed of episodes in which he rejects chival-
ry, hedonism, poetry, and religion to accept things as they are. To
Cabell this attitude is a mature acceptance identified with middle age,
a time for setting aside sexual, religious and poetic involvements. Jur-
gen's journeying in the middle of his life is downward through vicarship
and hedonism to Hell and upward to a Heaven created by Koshchei in the
image of Jurgen's grandmother's belief, and finally, downward again to
the middle regions, the grumbling, taxpaying world of his wife, Lisa,
his pawnshop, and old age. Cabell has replaced the zigzag pattern of The
Cream of the Jest with the descending-ascending allegorical journey. The
Greco-Medieval combination of The Odyssey and the Divina Commedia provides
a loose episodic order for Cabell's literary, philosophical, and ethical
positions.

^See works by Davis, Wells and Rothman.

70

The episodes of Jurgen represent various rejections which are a
turning away from dynamic illusions, or an exchange of one set of dynamic
illusions for another. Jurgen's dreams are rejected but not forgotten,
and they are likely to recur. Systematically, episode by episode, he re-
jects chivalry in the form of Guinevere; hedonistic sex in Anaitis, a
nature myth; realism, in the Brown Man, the Lord of the Two Truths; ideal
classic poetic inspiration in Helen; guilt in Hell, man's dynamic illu-
sion of a punishment suitable for his sins; and, finally, optimism in
Heaven, a romantic, youthful acceptance of the beliefs of old age. Jur-
gen's rejections are Cabell's negations of the dynamic illusions which he
says govern civilization. Notably, he has Jurgen reject these dreams
twice; the second rejection occurs in the last episode of the novel when
Jurgen returns, with the aid of Koshchei to his wife, "the voice of Judg-
ment" and the ultimate human compromise.

In Jurgen Cabell has mirrored the complexity of his conceptions
which are expressed more abstractly in Beyond Life. Jurgen is an aging
ex-poet who has not completely lost his poetic attitude; he has been
chivalrous, but vicarship to God, too, has become a memory. He has been
a hedonist, but physical limitations have destroyed all save the memory
of physical accomplishments; he has been a believer in the religious es-
sentials, guilt and optimism, but these notions evaporated with youth.
Now, he accepts, and he works within the world as it is; however, he
aids in the development of all the illusions which he has abandoned.
Having been deeply involved in these illusions, he now stands outside
them, believing in them, remembering, knowing the good generated by these
forces with, but somehow content' with his less imaginative lot.

71

Jurgen's dream experiences are comparable to the dynamic illusion
created by the Demiurge; they exist in a complicated progressive inter-
relationship--an interdependence resulting from their common source.
The pattern of action in Jurfien is repetitious and cyclical because of
this interdependence of illusions. For Cabell, history, mythology, re-
ligion, and poetry must be viewed as manifestations of the unknowable
third truth which the human mind, in this case represented by the skep-
tical and worldly-wise Jurgen, only glimpses through the dynamic illu-
sions. All of Jurgen's dreamed adventures in the shadowy cave are speci-
fic incidents reflecting the Spirit of Romance's creations in history,
myth, religion, and poetry. His rejection of each of them as a way of
living is Cabell's most extensive examination of the more rationalistic
gallant attitude overriding poetry and chivalry. Jurgen accepts illu-
sions for what they are and recognizes his part in creating them, but he
remains aloof from them by pursuing a life devoted to the diversions
which he enjoys. He insists upon keeping the two parts of his life — the
dreams and the actualities — absolutely separate. He does not wish to at-
tain the dreams, only to dream dreams and he is satisfied with his life
as Lisa's husband and a pawnbroker.

Jurgen and Figures of Earth have a contrapuntal relationship that
is essentially a variant resolution of two related but different patterns.
Cabell writes in the author's note to the Storisende edition of Figures
of Earth that "where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the uni-
verse. . . . Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme as Jurgen is its
Ulysses" (II, xxiv). He concentrates on Manuel's actions and both Jur-
gen's thoughts and actions (II, xxiv).

72

Figures of Earth is another development of the quest- journey ex-
ploits of a hero, in this case, the hero in spirit of Tlie Biography.
Manuel's journeying is both a quest for self-fulfillment, as a man who
follows after his own desires and thinking, and a denial of the dream-
world of the poet, beyond life. In this order Manuel turns away from his
youthful love, Suskind; the politically powerful Alianora; and the guard-
ian of poetic inspiration, Freydis. Manuel, like Jurgen, rejects life as
a maker, or poietes, to become a man of action, but his actions are con-
ceived as a part of his vicarship to God.

Each book of Figures of Earth is given a title taken from account-
ing terminology: "The Book of Credit" — Manuel's quest mission up Vraidex
to Doubtful Palace; "The Book of Spending" — his sojourn with Alianora;
"The Book of Cost Accounting" — his sojourn with Freydis and the image
makers; "The Book of Surcharge"--his life as a ruler and redeemer of
Poictesme; and "The Book of Settlement"--his departure. The analogy im-
posed here is a loose one between an account book and Manuel's actions.

The climax of Manuel's picaresque adventures is his reign over
Poictesme, which he redeems from the Northmen and which he holds in liege
to Horvendile, the fictive Author of The Biography. His characteristics
as a Redeemer are the philosophical climax of the novel. Having peppered
his book with Biblical associations, Cabell explicates them internally in
the final episode. Miramon Lluagor, one of the Fellows of The Silver
Stallion, draws a complicated parallel between Manuel's actions and those
of Christ and other redeemers of mankind. The analogy between Christ's
life and Manuel's is a broad one and there is really no need to expect a
tight parallel between the pattern of Figures of Earth and any particular

73

synoptic Gospel. Miramon describes the details of that life which make
it suitable to be that of a Redeemer. Manuel was '"born in a cave at
about the time of the winter solstice, of a virgin mother and of a father
who was not human'"; he "'wandered duly from place to place, bringing
wisdom and holiness to men'"; and he "'duly performed miracles, such as
reviving dead persons and so on--'"; and he '"duly sojourned with evil
in a desert place,'" and was '"tempted to dispair and blaspheme and to
commit other iniquities "' (II, 226). Miramon then notes that these have
been characteristic of all reputable Redeemers: Mithras, Huitzilopochtli,
Tamouz, Heracles, Gautama, Dionysos, and Krishna (II, 227). He does not
specifically mention Christ. Manuel accepts his role as a Redeemer and
descends into a cave for three days to be properly prepared. Here his
journeying on earth ends for he remains in Poictesme to defend it from
Philistia's threats until he dies.

Cabell explores the major dynamic illusions systematically in
Figures of Earth, as he did Jurgen. but the rejections are made by a
man of action whose motto is Multi Vult Decipi. Manuel rejects the
dreamworld of Vraidex, the political ambitions of Alianora, and the
image making of Audela, and accepts his life in Poictesme with Niafer.
He also accepts the notion of man's vicarship to God, but this accept-
ance does not involve an optimistic illusion of life beyond death. Man-
uel is not an optimist and the climax of Figures of Earth— his departure
with Grandfather Death — is a willing acceptance of the inevitable un-
known end of all men.

Jurgen participates in the events of each episode; Manuel works at

74

avoiding involvement while he pursues the devices and desires of his own
heart. Jurgen's end is middle age; Manuel's end is disillusionment and
death, but his life is carried on in a new redemption myth. In Manuel
Cabell depicts a skeptical lonely anti-poet who finds discontent as a
redeemer and ruler. The end of his rise from swineherd to liege lord is
boredom and a desire for the meeting with death.

Jurgen can be God but he chooses middle age; Manuel is the ruler
of Poictesme, but he turns to death and hence to immortality as a new re-
ligion. What Manuel appeared to be in his life becomes an ideal way of
life--a religious cult. Manuel's acceptance of his lot and his acknowl-
edgement of the necessity of belief in vicarship to God becomes the pat-
tern which Cabell examines throughout The Biography.

The shaping of Manuel's life into a major dynamic illusion--a
religious cult--is the subject of Tlie Silver Stallion. Cabell calls The
Silver Stallion a parody of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Equally
apparent is its indebtedness to the Arthurian legends, but then perhaps
there is an inherent similarity between the apostles of Christ develop-
ing Christianity into a coherent religion and the knights of the round-
table making the ideals of chivalry the moral code of an age. The form
of The Silver Stallion is certainly the same episodic quest journey form
of Acts and the Arthurian legend. In The Silver Stallion, the followers
of Manuel engage in quests, missions, and evangelism in the name of his
legend and in opposition to many other religions and myths.

The Silver Stallion is clearly a parody of Acts and the Arthurian
legends; it is also a reworking and ordering of the pattern of man's myth

75

making ability into a commentary on the human spirit.

In this novel religion or the mythic content of religion is the
dynamic illusion that Cabell takes as his subject. Since he assumes that
religions are created by man and as a direct result of the Spirit of
Romance, there is little doubt that the poetic attitude is at work in the
shaping of any religion. The making of a religion is a poetic act--the
use of raw materials of life to attain immortality. Cabell regards the
hero of The Silver Stallion as the idea of Manuel. "The theme of this
book, then, is how that legend ('of the all-powerful Redeemer who will
come again, tomorrow') came to attach itself to Dom Manuel; how, in
particular, that legend afterward affected, or did not affect, those
persons who had known Dom Manuel almost intimately; and how in the end
nobody believed in it any longer except Donander Veratyr. But Donander
Veratyr was God" (III, xvi).

The Silver Stallion contains several quest journey episodes in
which followers of Manuel live or fail to live according to their legen-
dary model as they attempt to shape that legend to make it work as a
dynamic illusion. They are representative of all the attitudes— chiv-
alry, gallantry and poetry. Some conceive of themselves as vicars of
God; some deny this vicarship to pursue lives of diversion; and all of
them contribute some part of themselves to the legend.

After the introductory book in which Horvendile assigns tasks,
each of the remaining nine books is devoted to a description of the way
in which these tasks are accomplished. Five of these episodes are quest
journeys in which the personal drives of the knight and his allegiance to

76

Dom Manuel's legend are in conflict.

Gonfal journeys South to overthrow the mythology of the funda-
mentalists, but he quickly succumbs to the female wiles of Queen Morvyth
of Inis Dahut. For him Manuel is dead and there is nothing of value in
the legend of Manuel. He questions the value of political power, wisdom
and love, saying that they are worthless illusions which he as an ex-
poet has found to be ephemeral. Declaring himself a realist, he readily
accepts his own execution at the order of Queen Morvyth; Gonfal, then,
denies the demiurgic spirit of Romance, pursues a life devoted to gal-
lantry and dies fully accepting the world as it is. The legend of Manuel
has in him its first martyr, a necessary ingredient for any religion.
Gonfal is like Jurgen, in some ways, but unlike Jurgen he throws over il-
lusion for reality; he does not possess Jurgen' s ability to straddle the
world of illusion and the world as it is.

Goth's quest journey takes him West and his main desire is to save
the Manuel he knew from the idea of him as it is being developed by Nia-
fer, St. Holraendis and lying poets. Where Gonfal denies Manuel any
existence after his departure from Poictesme, Goth professes to keep
the real Manuel intact against all comers. He is journeying to fetch
Manuel back because he refuses to believe that he is dead.

Goth's journeying takes him through many lands and in each he
honors the particular religious custom of that land. He is capable of
accepting any illusion so long as acceptance is expedient. In Tollan,
Yaot, in order to rid himself of Goth, wills the spirit of Manuel back
and the spirit bestows a final obligation on the only person on earth

77

who loves him as he was. Manuel's spirit tells Coth that the fictions
being created in his name are better than the real thing; so he as a
Fellow of the Silver Stallion must obey and forget Manuel the man to
take up the idea of Manuel, the Redeemer, the idea created and embel-
lished by Jurgen, Holmendis, Niafer, and the lying poets.

Coth returns to Poictesme where he confronts the legend of Manuel
as it has been developed around Jurgen' s childish lie. He disparages
the legend, but he accepts the motto "Mundus Vult Decipi," making em-
blems bearing it the major icons of his house. Remembering the days of
his quest, Coth grows old in a world founded on a legend which he knows
to be untrue. Finally he dies feeling cheated by life. He has failed to
make the compromise with the fiction by which fools live.

Both of these followers of Manuel reject the legend and accept
death without belief; but both become parts of the legend which makes
saints of all those who knev Manuel. Gonfal is a martyr and Coth be-
comes a fondly remembered elder who ostensibly seems to preserve the
memory of Manuel the Redeemer until his last day.

The remaining quest journeys in The Silver Stallion are spiritual
and supernatural. As in The Cream of the Jest and Something About Eve,
Cabell shifts his attention to the internal problems of his heroes.
Guivric the Sage discovers that his world though materially secure, is
spiritually disrupted; so he goes East to seek some solution from the
Glaum without Bones. As he journeys East he gradually loses his physi-
cal form and when he arrives at the Glaum' s place he discovers that he is
at home. The Glaum has taken Guivric' s body, leaving only his spirit.

78

As Guivric, the Glaum becomes a pillar of the religion of Manuel, The
real Guivric, now only a Phantom, wanders the hills of Perdigon, diffus-
ing funeral odors, walking on feet with illuminated soles, and making
girls giggle and blush.

Guivric 's journey back to complete spiritual existence is a jour-
ney toward origins of religions, the East. It is a movement away from the
corroding, life-sucking life of Asch (Cash) and of power and security.
He is throwing off the vestments of life for a phantom existence as a
legendary, lecherous devil-spirit. His physical self adheres to a be-
lief in the legend of Manuel; his spiritual self becomes an adversary of
that belief, a ghostly illusion that attracts believers away from the
ideals of Manuel.

Kevin of Nointel's dream journey is an underground one in search
of all knowledge or truth as a gift for his wife. The ultimate truth
that he discovers after studying all recorded knowledge under the tute-
lage of Sclaug the Vampire, is that nobody knows why life is given to
human beings. The acquisition of all knowledge leads to skepticism.
When Kevin returns to Poictesme, he immediately becomes a convert to the
great cult of Manuel. He blindly accepts "the sublime truths about
Manuel the Redeemer" and "turns his interest again to life's unimportant
superficial, familiar tasks, and on his food" (III, 212).

In Kevin's quest Cabell depicts the nature of skeptical belief and
acceptance which grows out of knowledge, but disavows the truth it knows
while believing a dynamic illusion. These myths or illusions generate
good and can be accepted as truth even though they are not. Kevin accepts

79

and compromises; as a result of this compromise he lives and his progeny
live, dutifully embellishing the legend of Manuel.

Donander's quest takes him to Valhalla, the Hall of the Chosen.
There he accepts the heaven of the heathen though he continues to be-
lieve in the legend of Manuel. In Valhalla he fits out a chapel, a
place where he can pray for "the second coming of Manuel and for the
welfare of Donander's soul upon the Holy Morrow of Judgment" (III, 266),
After a while in pagan eternity, Donander becomes a demiurge and begins
to create worlds, planetary systems, and universes. All of these diver-
sions of Valhalla, however, seem to him to be only "illusions planned
with some evil spirit's aid to tempt Donander away from respectability
and the true faith" (III, 277). The Demiurge, here represented as
Donander Veratyr, creates dynamic illusions which are worlds and universes;
but he has a human heart which makes him a devout believer in another il-
lusion which he did not create, the legend of the redeemer, of hope and
salvation for mankind as well as God.

All of these journeys and those sections of The Silver Stallion
which are not quests become a part of the legend of Manuel. The episodes
are described in the nine books as they happened but within the legend
of Manuel they assume the form of poetic sagas. Horvendile, the fictive
Author within The Biography and the all-knowing creator of these events,
returns to call attention to discrepancies between the legends and actu-
ality. With a cruel smile he says:

So does it come about that the sag?i of Manuel and the
sagas of all the lords of the Silver Stallion have been
reshaped by the foolishness and the fond optimism of

80

mankind; and these sagas now conform in everything to
that supreme romance which preserves from insanity [sic] .
For it is just as I said, years ago, to one of these
drolly white-washed and ennobled rapscallions. All men
that live, and that go perforce about the world like
blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in
sight, have a vital need to believe in the sustaining
legend about the Redeemer, and about the Redeemer's
power to make those persons who serve him just and
perfect. (Ill, 293)

The journeys of those who deny Manuel or make a compromise with reality
in order to accept his legend or carry that belief into the pagan cosmol-
ogy become integral parts of Manuel's legend as a Redeemer and the sym-
bolic vicarship of man to God. They in conjunction with Manuel's own
actions are the raw materials out of which the poets construct the myths
that guide men toward that which they cannot attain.

The theme of compromise and acceptance occurs again in Something
About Eve, the story of the quest journey of the mind of a would-be poet.
Gerald Musgrave's journey toward Antan is an allegorized version of the
literary artist's temptations as he seeks poetic perfection. The epi-
sodes, like those in Jurgen and Figures of Earth, are complex objectifi-
cations of a man's mind internally facing and rejecting dynamic illusions.
The impetus for this symbolic quest is not a dream, but a bargained ex-
change between the physical poet and the spirit of the poet. While
Gerald's spirit travels, his body is occupied by a Glaum.

With Horvendile's aid, Gerald bypasses Manhood, pauses in the
mirror of Romance, destroys the mirror of the flesh-colored veil of
Reality, the mirror of the male and female principle; then he comes to
his resting place with Maya and her rose-colored glasses, a compromise
existence which he accepts even though it keeps him away from Antan, the

81

misty final place of all myths and poets. During his stay on Mispec
Moor, he spends his days conversing about literary matters with various
myths and poets who are completing their journeys to Antan. When he
leaves the Moor at fifty-eight, he accepts his body's non-romantic de-
votion to a study of the two truths, male and female. Like Jurgen he
must content himself with studying these aspects of living, because his
age no longer permits participation.

Gerald's spiritual journey comes to a climax when he turns from
his goal, the ruling of Antan as the Lord of the Third Truth. His jour-
neying was guided by Horvendile up to the time that he stopped at Mispec
Moor, When Maya takes over Horvendile' s demiurgic power over the mind
ceases. Like Jurgen, Musgrave is in the end stripped of his romantic
notions, his elaborate cloak of dynamic illusions. The implication at
the conclusion of Something About Eve is that this spiritual journeying
toward Antan is always being undertaken by some poet's mind. As Gerald's
spirit returns to Gerald's body, the Glaum starts toward Antan and he
looks very much like Horvendile — the fictional Author of The Biography.
Gerald, having given up the writing of that work about Dom Manuel's life,
someone must take it up.

This device of the ending that is another beginning of the cir-
cular archetypal journey occurs in Jurgen, Figures of Earth, and The High
Place. At the end of his life Manuel the Redeemer steps into the Lethe
but it suddenly becomes the Haranton, a stream out of which he stepped
at the beginning of the novel. Jurgen thinks of returning to the cave
to begin his adventure in dreams over again. At the end of The High

82

Place Florian is back at the beginning of the life he has just dreamed
of living. That each journey seems on the verge of beginning again and
taking the same direction supports Cabell's notion of the journey as an
archetypal pattern in great fiction. As the journey pattern suggests
many classical journeys such as The Odyssey and The Divina Commedia, so
in its endings it suggests constant repetition of both pattern and theme.

In The High Place Cabell again uses the dream journey framework,
but there is a critical inversion of the pattern. Florian, the dreaming
hero and the absolute sensualistic representative of the gallant atti-
tude, attains his ideals of beauty and holiness at the beginning of his
journey. The quest, then, is a series of trials performed to secure his
release from the corroding influence of the embodiments of beauty and
holiness.

The pattern of The High Place is a very symmetrical one; ten-year-
old Florian dreams a romantic dream after finishing Charles Perrault's
recently published collection of fairy tales (c . 1698). His dream is
the story of his attainment of supposed ideal love, Melior, and supposed
perfect holiness, St. Hoprig. His knowledge of these two leads quickly
to disillusionment and to their destruction as his ideals. Out of neces-
sity to rid himself of the perfect woman and the perfect saint, Florian
bargains with Janicot in a kind of reversed Faust-Mephistopheles arrange-
ment. To attain this freedom from his idols, Florian destroys his poli-
tical illusion, ignores the mists of Antan, seduces Freydis, ridicules an
optimistic literary gander, rejects religion, and finally seeks to destroy
himself. At the moment he chooses to die rather than to live with Melior
and St. Hoprig, the dream ends, apparently with Janicot keeping his part

83

of the bargain; the much wiser but disillusioned ten-year-old Florian
wakes with Perrault's tales in his lap.

As the other allegorical novels have associations with classical
literary journeys, the form and content of The Hifih Place is derived from
the fairy tale. Perrault's tales are converted into dreams which are
dominated by a theme of disillusionment and the destruction of fantasy-
inspired dreams. Cabell transforms the Sleeping Beauty, the Prince, the
King, and Puss-in-Boots into Melior, a shrewish wife, Florian, a sensu-
alist, the King, an opportunist, and the Collyn in the pot, a peculiar
creature that answers questions. Mother Goose becomes a gander who
voices the essence of Beyond Life. And, in addition to these figures
from Perrault, Florian meets the mythical gods of things as they are,
Cabell's pantheon of realists: Koshchei, Janicot, Pan, and Grandfather
Death. Florian' s desire to accept in the gallant manner, defeats all
those who tempt him away from his avowed purpose: to destroy his alle-
giance to beauty and holiness. Having journeyed through episodes which
symbolically present the other attitudes and the dynamic illusions which
men believe in, Florian finally returns from his disillusioning dream
to Poictesme to shape his own standards in gallantry and to die a com-
pletely domesticated man with his ideals of beauty and holiness always
out of reach.

Cabell has in these five major novels examined the dynamic illu-
sions, the Demiurge spirit of Romance, and the auctorial virtues from
many different points of view and in different contexts. Each allegori-
cal journey has a similar ending: acceptance of the human condition, the

84

compromise with the world as it is and the understanding of the nature
of illusions. Jurgen exposes the illusions to reason, keeping his dream
of perfection, Helen, intact as dream. Manuel exposes the illusions to
the force of action and becomes the subject of a religion. The knights
of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion deny any belief or they accept
the disparity between beliefs and actualities. Gerald exposes the illu-
sions to imaginative self-consciousness and turns away from poetry to
ethnic sexology. And Florian dissolves his ideals in an effort to live
a life of self-sufficiency void of holiness and beauty.

Cabell's poet-heroes stop writing, his dreamers cease to dream
without skepticism, and his sensualists become domesticated. The third
truth in Antan, Pseudopolis, Heaven, or Hell, evades them; their lives
subside in two truths: "We copulate and die." The pattern is simple:
the hero is challenged (he dreams), he seeks (he journeys), and he falls
short (he accepts and compromises). There are no happy endings and no
final resolutions to Cabell's working out of the basic paradox of his
literary theory. All the poet-heroes learn to live with the paradox:
the dream and the reality will never be one though they are dependent on
one another. The poet-dreamer imagines a world in which his imaginative
characters and illusions function; his main problem is the necessity of
distinguishing between the fantasy world and the real one. The novels
discussed in this section are fictional examinations of the ways in which
two poets, two ex-poets, five followers of a legend, and a man who leads
a poetic life respond to this paradox.

85

. Places

Cabell's fictive places are the most specifically allegorical as-
pects of his fiction, and for that reason they are essential parts of
his fictionally expounded theory of literature. With the exception of
Lichfield,, Fairhaven, and Poictesme, he spends less effort on describing
the physical details about places than he does in fully examining their
abstract significance. This scarcity of descriptive detail is in itself
an aspect of the literary theory for he speaks out against the intrusion
of extraneous materials into fiction:

For one, I confess that when any writer formally and im-
personally sets out to describe anything, I find it hard to
put up with his nonsense. When I am in my more amiable moods,
then hurrying eyes glide by solid stolid-looking paragraphs;
I incuriously accept on faith the probability that the descrip-
tion is being competently attended to: and I, unvexed, pass on
toward such portions of the book as may conceivably prove re-
munerative reading. . . . But far oftener am I the prey of
logic and of peevishness, when I consider the malversation of
time involved in every attempt to convey the true efficacy of
a regarded vista, or of any observed object, by recording seri-
atim such attributes as, in life, we note simultaneously with
plural senses. (XVII, 227-228)

Cabell's aversion to lengthy descriptive passages is by no means a child-
like desire for more action and less pause; it is a part of his concern
for "a conscious point of view" in any novel. He believes that the novel-
ist should only permit himself those descriptions "which would be noted,
naturally, from that point of view at that especial moment. And all de-
scription will thus be converted into action, in the form, not necessarily
stated outright, that so-and-so observed such-and-such phenomena" (XVII,
228). Cabell opposes the omniscient author and favors a limited

66

omniscience with concentration on a central intelligence. He states
what he calls a truism of the novelist's art: "that no scene or object
can display any qualities unless there is some one to notice thera; that,
even then, these qualities stay undisplayed unless the potential observer
have the needful interest and the time, just then to notice them; and
that to present these qualities as existing impersonally--howsoever
general in 'writing' may be the insane practice, --is to present (here
again) an existence which is inconceivable" (XVII, 228). The statement
only seems to argue for absolutely logical and realistic reflection of
the plausible in fiction. In truth it is the theoretical basis that
Cabell uses to avoid realistic detail; it is the principle underlying
the romantic attitude toward place throughout The Biography. Cabell had
early in his career trapped himself into using details about real places
in his fiction and he found it too confining for his stories and ideas.
At the moment of this discovery he began to create the imaginary places--
Poictesme, Fairhaven, Lichfield, Antan, Audela — where the actions of his
novels could occur unhampered by rules that govern actuality.

Though Cabell favors anagrams for place names, thereby locking
their meanings in one term, some allegorical places of his fiction are
not anagrams. Antan is literary in origin, and Philistia is a Biblical
place name. The anagrammatic place names are frequent and character-
istically Cabellian in Something About Eve, Gerald's journey toward Antan
takes him to Doonham (Manhood), Dersam (Dreams), and Dersam's royal
palace, Caer Omn (Romance); then to Lytreia (Reality) and finally to
Turoine (Routine) on the outskirts of his last stop, Mispec Moor (Com-
promise), the home of Maya, the eternal female principle. These places

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are briefly described, but such passages are minimal and logically only
what Gerald Musgrave might observe in passing. When he arrives at Doon-
ham (Manhood), a river, the following passage occurs: "Directly before
him the deep river sparkled and rippled eastward with unhurried, very
shallow undulations. But, under the sun's warmth, mists rising every-
where above the waters streamed eastward, too, unhastily, and in such
unequal volume that now this and now another portion of the wide land-
scape beyond the river was irregularly glimpsed and then, gradually but
with a surprising quickness, veiled. Very lovely medallions of green
lawns and shrubbery and distant hills thus seemed to take form and then
to dissolve into the mist's incessant gray flowing, toward the newly
risen sun. . ."(X, 57). Cabell's description serves to indicate Mus-
grave' s sensual response and to clarify the symbolic river's meaning as
a representative of the normal pattern of man's life. The river moves
in time through various atmospheres and panoramas and into a mist.

Dersam (Dreams) is only described as being in desolation because
its leige lord. Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, has departed to take up an
earthly existence. The royal palace of Dersam, Caer Oran (Romance) has a
walled garden and a golden mirror which glows with golden mists. Lytreia
has one notable place, Peter's Tomb, and that has two relics: "An over-
candidly carved and painted post which stood in eternal erection at the
door of the tomb" (X, 113) and a flesh-colored mirror. Turoine (Routine)
is described only as "a small free city given to sorceries of two colors"
(X, 137). There is no description of Mispec Moor (Compromise). Clearly
the main notions about the places are communicated through the anagram-

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matic names and the allegorical events that occur in them. Cabell some-
times complicates these meanings vd.th esoteric and obscure learning, but
in general the intent is clear and the meanings are sustained throughout
each episode.

Audela (beyond) and Antan (yesteryear) represent the beginning
and the end of poetry. Audela and its fire, the source of poetic in-
spiration that produces great poets, is one of Cabell's most elaborately
conceived mythic places. In Figures of Earth he first describes its qual-
ities through Freydis, its former queen, who has been called out of
Audela by Manuel's magic. To her Audela alone is real. "Here (on earth)
all is but a restless contention of shadows which pass presently; here
all that is visible and all the colors known to men are shadows dimming
the true colors; here time and death, the darkest shadows known to men,
delude you with false seemings; for all such things as men hold incon-
testable, because they are apparent to sight and sense, are a weariful
drifting of fogs that veil the world which is no longer mine. So in
this twilit [sic] world of yours do we of Audela appear to be but men and
women" (II, 102). Audela lies behind the veil of sight and sense. "This
veil that separates Audela from earth may not ever be lifted; but very
often the veil is pierced, and noting the broken places, men call it
fire. Through these torn places men may glimpse the world that is real;
and their glimpse dazzles their dimmed eyes and weakling faces, and
through these rent places, when the opening is made large enough, a few
men here and there not quite so witless as their fellows, know how to
summon ua of Audela" (II, 102). These figures from Audela work in the

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the shadow world of man and sometimes they give "a spark of the true
life of Audela" to earthen figures who are then great poets and whom all
the other people "applaud as the most trivial of men and women" (II, 103).

This land, which Manuel rejects, is a mythic version of one of the
most important ideas of Cabell's literary theory. Audela is the essence
of romance, the force that emerges only in the poet. For Cabell it is the
truth beneath the veil of life, the fire at the center and the source of
poetic imaginativeness. Poets have access to the fire in two ways: by
making the breaks in the veil themselves, as Prometheus, the archetypal
artist did, and by having the gift of the fire of Audela bestowed upon
them without their volition. Both ways reflect the traditional Romantic
view of the poet as a special man--a man capable of seeing beyond the
veil to the fiery heart of the matter. This divine and mystical poetic
urge for the most part seems to come from outside the poet and it drives
him to create. For Cabell all of those great literary figures discussed
in Beyond Life— Marlowe, Congreve, Wycherly, Sheridan, Villon, Thackeray,
and Dickens— are Audela-inspired. This divine nature of poetic inspira-
tion has as its corollary the Romantic notion of the poet as a demon-
haunted, God-touched individual who sees through the veil darkly.
Audela is an absolute idea as the Demiurge is an absolute idea; only
the poet, the maker, reveals the absolute truth, reality without the
shadows of life. Such reality or truth is obviously not synonymous with
actuality or a physical condition; it is essence, the urge to create, the
force behind the dynamic illusions that have their most accurate shaping
in poets. Cabell's reality is the spirit of Romance and the spirit of

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Romance is represented by Audela and more philosophically by the Demi-
urge. Manuel's rejection of Audela' s fire and his abduction of its
queen amount to a rejection of art as a way of living and a preference
for the chivalric and gallant illusions of Poictesme.

Antan, yesteryear, is less precisely defined than Audela, but it
occupies an important position in the allegorical journeys of The Biogra-
phy . None of Cabell's poet-heroes reaches Antan. Gerald stops short of
it on Mlspec Moor, which overlooks the valley Antan. Queen Freydis,
exiled from Audela, now reigns, with the consort, the Master Philologist,
over "the word as it was in the beginning," and supervises reinterpre-
tation of past myths and poetry. Gerald's quest is an attempt to restore
this resting place of dynamic illusions to the rule of a poet.

Antan, like Audela, is not an anagram; it is a word taken from
the refrain of a Villon ballade: "Ou sont les neiges d'antan." The
other places have specific unchanging qualities that are represented
within names, thus giving them fixed positions in the allegory. Antan
does not; it is an allusion to a line of imaginative literature. It is
a hazy, misty land toward which great poets journey for absolute self-
realization as poets. Antan is the final resting place of created il-
lusions, the Elysian fields for completed poetic lives. No one returns
from it and few reach it. Antan, yesteryear, is the echoing, illusory
refrain of an old song. It alone is not ruled by the Two Truths with
their teaching that "we copulate and die." The ruling truth of this re-
alism is the unknown Third Truth.

Antan Is also the final resting place of all past myths and legends,

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In Antan, the Master Philologist explicates all myths, resolving their
existence as dynamic illusions in pedantic analysis. Horvendile, the di-
abolical Author, explains this aspect of Antan while extoling the superi-
ority of the two truths. "Men have found many gods, but these gods pass.
They descend into Antan, and they do not return. One God and one Goddess
alone do not pass. They remain eternally, if but to weave eternally a
mist about the seeing and the thinking of the young, and thus to secure
the existence of yet other young persons within a month or so" (X, 295).
The two truths rule the Marches of Antan, and they alone cannot be
evaporated into interpretations. Gerald answers this attack on his own
which emphasizes his preference for the poetic imagination. For him a
poet's dream of a place is always more lovely than the place. "So a
logical poet will always destroy his appointed kingdom because in this
way only can he convert it into a beautiful idea" (X, 297).

Those who travel past Gerald to Antan include Nero, Villon, Odys-
seus, Solomon, and Merlin Ambrosius; all of them so journey to find com-
pletion or to settle their discontent and to have possession of "the word
which was in the beginning." They are driven by a desire for unknown
possibilities; Antan is the mythical unknown, a future illusion based on
the history and legends of the past; it is an end for those who are dis-
contented with the present. It represents the impossibility of achieving
all of the auctorial virtues.

The only Cabellian hero who ever enters Antan and returns is
Florian. He goes in quest of a magical sword, Flamberge, and he seduces
the Queen of Antan to get it; as an absolute sensualist he is immune to

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the mists and illusions of Antan. His actions are pragmatic: he must
have the sword Freydis has in the storeroom of mythical swords, and she
is a beautiful woman. Having dwelled so long on the mystical notion of
Antan, Cabell characteristically undermines the illusiveness by having a
man of action invade it and remain unchanged. Illusions are of no con-
sequence to Florian, and Antan is a storehouse of past illusions.

Audela and Antan are allegorical representations of absolute
truth and the past illusions which survive in the misty future. Two
other places in The Biography are less abstract but nonetheless important
to Cabell's theory of literature. Philistia and Pseudopolis must be con-
sidered together because together they reflect Cabell's critical view of
his own literary age.

Philistia is ruled by Queen Stultitia, who like Sereda wears rose-
colored glasses. The law of Philistia is that a man but do what is ex-
pected of him; "the Philistines were created after the images of Kosh-
chei who made things as they are" (VI, 205). In Philistia babies are
brought by storks — "even an allusion to the possibility of misguided
persons obtaining a baby in any other way these Philistines consider to
be offensive and lewd and lascivious and obscene" (II, 187). To Cabell
Philistia is synonymous with the taste of the twentieth century and the
prevalence of realism. The Philistines, self-appointed arbiters and re-
alistic writers, are the corroders of taste and of the auctorial virtues
in the United States. In Jurgen he unleashed a satirical attack on them,
in Beyond Life and Straws and Prayerbooks he is more particular in naming
these offenders against taste.

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Pseudopolis, "a city builded of gold and ivory, now all dazzling
glitter under a hard-sunning sky that appeared unusually remote from
earth" (VI, 189), is ruled by Helen of Troy and populated by all of the
Greek heroes. "Here was the house of Ajax Telemon who reigned in sea-
girt Salamis, here that of God-like Philoctetes, much-counseling Odysseus
dwelt just across the way, and the corner residence was fair-haired
Agammemnon ' s : in the moonlight Jurgen easily made out these names en-
graved upon the bronze shield that hung beside each doorway" (VI, 220).

As the home of Hellenic culture, Pseudopolis is constantly under
attack by Philistia. Finally Philistia captures Pseudopolis but not be-
fore Helen and the Greeks fly away, deus ex machina fashion, to the more
conducive climate of the past. The gods of the Philistines, Sesphra
(Phrases), Vel-Tyno (Novelty), and Ageus (Usage) enter the city as Queen
Dolores Stultitia acclaims that they "open the door for Realism once for
all" (VI, 227). For Cabell Philistia represents the absence of beauty,
symmetry, and urbanity and the ascendency of dullness, hypocrisy, novelty
for novelty's sake, slogans, and the governing force of usage. It is a
place and a state of mind in which classical tradition, symbolized by
Helen and the Greek heroes, cannot exist. Jurgen himself is tried for
obscenity by the Philistines and condemned to Hell on the unchallenged
evidence of the tumble bug, a thinly disguised caricature of John Sumner,
agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1919)—
America's major Philistine.

Fairhaven, Lichfield, and Poictesme are not so much allegorical
places as completely fictive worlds in which Cabell's heroes and heroines

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of Modern Virginia and Medieval France can dream and act according to the
three dominant attitudes--chivalry, gallantry, and poetry. Like Faulk-
ner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, these places have resemblances
to real places (Fairhaven to Williamsburg, Lichfield to Richmond, Poic-
tesme to Poitiers and Angouleme), but they are created to give the writer
a world which accurately frames his fictive vision. For Cabell these
meticulously conceived settings are denials of any possible realism; no
one can question the accuracy of his imaginative realms, and he denies
that they have any existence except in his mind and in the minds of his
characters.

Fairhaven, Virginia, is conveyed through the eyes and opinions of
its most famous inhabitant. His conception of it is clearly that of a
novelist :

Fairhaven, itself, I find, has in the matter of atmosphere
deteriorated rather appallingly since the town's northern out-
skirt was disfigured by a powder mill. Unfamiliar persons,
in new looking clothes, now walk on Cambridge Street, with
an unseemly effect of actual haste to reach their destination;
and thus pass unabashed by St. Martin's Churchyard, wherein
they have not any great grandparents. Immediately across
the street from the churchyard now glitters the Colonial
Moving Picture Palace: and most of the delectable old-
fashioned Aborigines 'take boarders' (at unbelievable rates)
and time honored King's College rents out its dormitories
in summer months to the munitions workers then, too, every-
body has money. ... In fine, there remains for the future
historian who would perfectly indicate how incredible were the
changes wrought by recent years, merely to make the statement
that Fairhaven was synchronized. For without any intermediary
gradation the town has passed from the 18th to the 20th cen-
tury. (I, 3-4)

Charteris' romantic point of view dominates his examination of transition

in the community that is the scene of most of his gallant behavior and

his gallant novel. The attitudes of the eighteenth century are his

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attitudes and the changing community is used here to illuminate the

conflict that Charteris feels with his world.

Lichfield, Virginia, Cabell's other modern setting, is also

described by Charteris in answer to a question concerning his failure

to use it as a setting for a novel.

I'/hy, no; if I were ever really to attempt a tale of
Lichfield, I would not write a romance but a tragedy.
I think that I would call my tragedy Futility, for it
would mirror the life of Lichfield with engaging candor;
and, as a consequence people would complain that my
tragedy lacked sustained interest, and that its partici-
pants were inconsistent; that it had no ordered plot, no
startling incidents, no high endeavors, and no special aim;
and that it was equally deficient in all time-hallowed
provocatives of either laughter or tears. For very few
people would understand that a life such as this, when
rightly viewed is the most pathetic tragedy conceivable.
(XIV, 133)

Charteris says that he could only write of the memory of eighteenth cen-
tury Lichfield that prolonged itself into the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. He finds the legend of Lichfield to have considerable vital-
ity and he defines the immortalization of that legend. "And wherein,
pray, have I harmed Lichfield by imagining a dream city situated half-way
between the Atlantic and Avalon and peopled with superhuman persons, --
and by having called the city Lichfield? The portrait did not only flat-
ter Lichfield, it flattered human nature" (XIV, 131). For Charteris as
for Patricia Stapylton, the heroine of The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck.
there are two Lichfields: the actual and the fictive. Patricia abhors
the legend calling Lichfield "a hamlet of Hamlets . . . where actual
tragedy isn't that their fathers were badly treated, but that they them-
selves are constitutionally unable to do anything except talk about how

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badly their fathers were treated" (XIV, 268). Both descriptions obvious-
ly have little to say about physical aspects of the town. The quality
captured is the moral and spiritual atmosphere of the community. The
point made by the descriptions is about the existence of paradoxical be-
lief and reality. In his depiction of two modern places, Cabell develops
two themes: the importance of fictive places and the clash between the
ideal remembered place and the actual place. His characters act in ideal-
ized places but they frequently refer to aspects of the actual places,
calling attention to the necessary compromise.

Poictesme, the most important of these places in relation to the
theory of literature, is the setting for all of Cabell's medieval novels
and stories. It is "a land wherein almost anything is rather more than
likely to happen save only one thing; it is not permitted in Poictesme
for anyone to cease, for one moment, from remaining a human being or
ever to deviate from human society." Furthermore it is "a land wherein
human nature kept its first dignity and strength, and wherein human pas-
sions were never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech
and action" (XVIII, 2A2). Poictesme is the setting in which Cabell pre-
sents and examines all of the attitudes as they came into existence or
were brought into focus by the acts of men, supernatural beings, and
women. There is not much in the way of physical detail about Poictesme
except a map which Cabell sketched out in order to keep track of the dis-
tance between towns, moors, heaths and castles within the province. The
realization of Poictesme comes entirely from the attitudes and experience
of the characters who live there. The sense of the place, as is the case

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with Lichfield and Fairhaven, is communicated in various points of view.

The two most important responses to Poictesme and some of its at-
mosphere are those of Manuel and Jurgen. For Manuel Poictesme is some-
thing like a prison. When he enters it as the triumphant redeemer, he
enters "into the imprisonment of his own castle and into the bonds of
high estate, from which he might not easily get free to go a-traveling
every whither, and see the ends of this world and judge them" (II, 234).
Here in his castle he looks out over his land through the three windows
of the Room of Ageus (Age us or Usage)— three windows which "had once
been a part of the temple of Ageus, an immemorial god of the Philistines"
(II, 252). "Through these windows Count Manuel could see familiar fields,
the long avenue of poplars and the rising hills beyond. All was as it had
been yesterday, all as all had been since nearly three years ago. Count
Manuel had first entered Storisende" (II, 253). Storisende is the capi-
tal of Poictesme and its loftiest part. Through two of these windows,
Manuel overlooks this pleasant domain but through the third window he
looks into "a limitless gray twilight wherein not anything was certainly
discernible, and the air smelt of spring." This is the extent of the
description of Poictesme from Manuel's point of view. It is indicative
of his self-absorption and the way in which Poictesme lends itself to
that dreaming. When Manuel leaves Poictesme he exits through the third
window to join Grandfather Death.

For Jurgen Poictesme is the starting point for his dream journey
and the home where he accepts life as it is. As he leaves on the journey
with his guide, Nessus the Centaur, his sense of place is phantasmagoric.

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For a while they went through the woods, which were composed
of big trees standing a goodish distance from one another,
with the Centaur's gilded hoofs rustling and sinking to a
thick carpet of dead leaves, all gray and brown, in level
stretches that were unbroken by any undergrowth and then
they came to a white roadway that extended due west, and
so were done with the woods. Now happened an incredible
thing in which Jurgen would never have believed had he not
seen it with his own eyes: for now the Centaur went so
fast that he gained a little upon the sun, thus causing
it to rise in the west a little by little; and these two
sped westward in the glory of a departed sunset. The sun
fell full in Jurgen' s face as he rode straight toward the
west, so that he blinked and closed his eyes, and looked
first toward this side then the other. Thus it was that
the country about him, and the persons they were passing
were seen by him in quick bright flashes, like pictures;
and all his memories of this shining highway were, in con-
sequence, always confused and incoherent. (VI, 11)

Jurgen' s vision of Poictesme is his own fantasy about his romantic past,

a past which he now dreams of as "the garden between Dawn and Sunrise."

The description of that garden, which is really the garden of Count Em-

merick at Storisende, is Jurgen' s state of mind:

This was a wonderful garden: yet nothing therein was
strange. Instead, it seemed that everything hereabouts
was heart-breakingly familiar and very dear to Jurgen.
For he had come to a broad lawn which slanted northward
to a well-remembered brook: and multitudinous maples and
locust-trees stood here and there, irregularly, and were
being played with very lazily by an irresolute west wind,
so that foliage seemed to toss and ripple everywhere like
green spray: but autumn was at hand, for the locust-trees
were dropping a Danae's shower of small round yellow leaves;
around the garden was an unforgotten circle of blue hills.
And his was a place of lucent twilight, unlit by either sun
or stars, and with no shadows anywhere in the diffused faint
radiancy that revealed this garden, which is not visible to
any man except in the brief interval between dawn and
sunrise. (VI, 12)

The garden is a symbolic representation of Jurgen' s romantic life in his
youth and his fading notion of that life in his middle age. It is a pro-
jection of what he was and what he is, commingled, as it were, in the

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dream. The Centaur defines the meaning of this real and imaginary garden

and in doing so he clarifies the meaning of Poictesme.

For in this garden . . . each man that ever lived has
sojourned for a little while, with no company save his
illusions. I must tell you again that in this garden
are encountered none but imaginary creatures. And stal-
wart persons take their hour of recreation here and go hence
unaccompanied, to become aldermen and respected merchants and
bishops, and to be admired as captains upon prancing horses,
or even as kings upon tall thrones; each in his station think-
ing not at all of the garden ever any more. But now and then
come timid persons, Jurgen, who fear to leave this garden
without an escort: so these must need to hence with one or
another imaginary creature, to guide them about alleys and
by-paths, because imaginary creatures find little nourish-
ment in the public highways, and shun them. Thus must these
timid persons skulk about obscurely with their diffident and
skittish guides, and they do not ever venture willingly into
the thronged places where men get horses and build thrones.
(VI, 14)

Poictesme, then, is the romantic idealization of the past. Most men
dwell in this world of ideals at some moment in their lives but they
emerge and become useful citizens. Some men always live in this illu-
sory world and they are the poets who accept the need for a fictive
vision, for a world where imagination controls content and dreams is
of greater consequence than actuality. Poictesme is governed by the
Demiurge Romance as it takes earthly shape in the form of the fictive
Author of The Biography, Horvendile. It is the place where myth, his-
tory, fairytale, fiction, and abstract theories can intermingle as in a
dream. It is a major part of a fictive world that has its own laws and
its own God, the Author.

Cabell's places function as specific terms and conceptions within
the theory of literature and his mode of depicting place Illustrates a

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basic tenet of that theory. His attitudes about the handling of place is
in keeping with his sense of symmetry and order as well as his desire to
reveal complex truths beyond mere observation or realistic detail. Place
is a part of sensual impression and idea; as such it must be revealed
through the minds of characters and not as though it were outside them.
This approach to the matter of setting is sufficient justification for
the heavy use of anagrammatic names and allegorical places. As the char-
acters embody ideas and attitudes, so the places which they experience
are further extensions of those ideas. Place intensifies the major con-
ceptions of the theory of literature.

Emblems

The aspects of fiction heretofore discussed do not encompass all
of Cabell's literary theory. I have categorized some of the other ele-
ments with the term "emblem," to suggest broader implications than symbol.
Cabell's five significant emblems are mirrors, veils, animals, Manuel's
tomb and statue, and the Sigil of Scoteia. Like witchwomen and places,
these emblems embody complex notions about the creative process and the
ends and means of fiction. With devices of mythical and critical origins,
Cabell ornaments and extends his theory; as his major icons, however,
they are sometimes the most illusively enigmatic details of The Biography.

The most frequent emblem in the novels is the mirror, which takes
the forms of metaphors and of magical doors to the mythic, literary, or
historical past. But, long before Cabell used this device, the mirror
was a metaphor in discussion of art and poetry. Reflection recurs in
major aesthetic theories from Plato forward. Abrams has carefully traced

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the mirror, the veil, and the lamp as metaphors in critical theory
through the 19th century and into the 20th. Traditionally the mirror
has either suggested art as a repre8entation--"a mirror held up to
nature" — or art as self-expression--the mirror that reflects the poet's
mind. The 18th century generally adhered to the former view, and the
latter came into prominence during the 19th century. The veil consistent-
ly suggested the shadows which cover the essences, the Ideas, and which
must be pierced by the true poet. The lamp as a symbol of the active,
creative imagination, was the essence of truth within the poet, and
therefore reflected in the mirror of art. Cabell's fictional mirrors,
veils, and fire are allegorical developments of these figures.

The mirrors encountered, in Something About Eve, by Gerald Mus-
grove on his journey toward Antan are emblems of qualities within the
poet's mind. Gerald must clean the Mirror of Reality (Lytreia) which is
a flesh colored phallic painting, and the Mirror of Romance (Caer Omn)
in Dersam (Dreams). After cleaning the Mirror of Romance, he is drawn
into its golden mist like a middle-aged Alice. One by one, he trans-
migrates through the forms of great poetic figures. With this device of
a mirror- journey, Cabell combines his notion of poetic evolution and

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and The Lamp, pp. 43-44. "Renaissance
Platonism guaranteed the impersonality of the artist's vision by making
metaphysical provision for linking the Idea to the individual mind to the
universal and unchanging ideas of the world-pattern. The connection
might be established by positing the existence of memory-traces of the
divine archetype, said to have been stamped into the intellect before
birth; it was sometimes supported by an elaborate optical analogy accord-
ing to which rays of archetypal beauty, streaming from the countenance of
God, are reflected in three mirrors, one in the angel, a second in the
souls of men, a third in the material world."

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archetypal poetic rebellion into a carefully modulated free-associative
pattern. The figures of Prometheus, Solomon, Odysseus, Judas, Nero,
Tannhauser, Villon, Faustus, Don Juan, and Jurgen share one common trait;
they revolt against Heaven in the name of their own self-expression, and
are pursued by omnipotence. This chapter emphasizes a recurrent concept
of the poet in The Biography; with the devil's aid the poets in the mir-
ror revolt against imposed order to create, but their rebellion is both
the source of their vitality as poets and the agent of their destruction.
The theme of rebellion from authority is the governing idea within the
mirror of Romance.

Incorporating the traditionally symbolic figure three, the third
mirror is the three inch square Mirror of the Third Truth, which is usu-
ally described in conjunction with three pigeons, the birds of Venus,
The enigma of this mirror is that it reflects man as he might want to
be (void of good or evil), his goals, and the perfection toward which he
might move. But the mirror's reflection is in a language that he does
not comprehend. Alternately, this mirror rests in Antan, belongs to
Solomon (who sees unattainable wisdom there), and becomes one of the
prizes brought to Queen Moryven by a suitor. All men must look into
this mirror who would see the truth void of illusion. But such full
self-realization occurs only in the presence of Venus "s birds. Like
Cabell's other mirror emblems, the magic of this one works to unify the
poet's mind and to unlock secrets within his imagination. Poets see
their goals and their deepest desires in the mirror three inches square
because It is less a mirror held up to nature than it is one turned

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inward to clarify outward poetic achievement. In so doing it makes
clear the self-projections of the poet, and, as in Gerald's case or
Solomon's, makes the acceptance of less than perfect accomplishment
bearable. As the ultimate container of the Third Truth, it reduces
that truth to the mystical three inches, and then brings about a signi-
ficant change in each poet who sees the reflection. Cabell leaves the
mirror and the pigeons unexplained, both because he has a desire to
puzzle and because of his sense of inexplicable truth. This emblem
always titillates the mind, because the meaning is not quite clear.
What I have offered is not so much an explanation as an examination of
Cabell's most explicit commentary about the mirror and the pigeons.

The veils described in The Biography are more orthodox and tradi-
tional in their meaning than the mirrors. Consistently, Cabell's veils
are synonymous with existence, the shadows which hide essence or Ideas.
Breaking the veil has two possible meanings: a sexual ritual such as
Jurgen and Anaitis perform in Cocaigne, a ceremony of consummation; and
the creative impetus of tearing the veil that hides the fire of Audela,
the spark that ignites great poets. For Cabell, this emblem, like the
mirror, combines both a sexual and literary aspect. The veil of physical
existence envelops two kinds of self-expression: love and art. The
three truths, those absolutes of Cabell's concept of the universe, art,
and the poet, are veiled. In his thinking, the poet must experience and
be freed of the first two truths before he can experience the third truth,
The veil over the two truths is easily broken or lifted, but few poets
share the fire beyond the veil which conceals Audela.

104

These veils and mirrors are somewhat complicated emblems of the
relationship between poetry, the poetic imagination, and actuality. But
the Gander, who appears in one episode of The Silver Stallion and in The
High Place, clearly states Cabell's theory of the spirit of Romance and
djmamic illusions. This garrulous, caged gander--Cabell' s version of
Mother Goose — speaks out in favor of romance and in opposition to both
knowledge and action. His ideas sound much like those of Charteris in
Beyond Life. As Kevin of Nointel searches for "all knowledge," the aged
Gander sings of ardors, raptures, and the future about which he knows
nothing. The Gander, in other words, creates to divert. The effect of
his singing is to fill his heavens with "a sentiment of their (man's) im-
portance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies" (III,
196). He sings of what he considers to be the most important things in
the universe, "the illusions of romance," while Kevin studies books.

Florian, in search of the instrument necessary for action, also
meets the Gander, who further develops an absolute force in man's dy-
namic illusions: "the glory of love," "the felicities of marriage,"
"patriotism," "success in business," "the high assurance of religion,"
"optimism, philanthropy, social improvement," "man that is the child and
heir of God," "the splendor of man's works," "the magnanimity of human
nature," and "the wonder of man's living upon earth" (VIII, 239-2A0).
The immortal Gander "leaves untroubled, at one time or another, the com-'
mon sense of no man who has lived upon earth" (VIII, 240).

Florian accuses the Gander of not seeing the world as it is and
the Gander answers with Cabell's basic fictive vision: "So noich the

105

worse for human beings. ... It does not bother me here in my cage.
Besides, the purposes and the effect of my singing is to fill my fellows
with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and the greatness
of their destinies. So I do not mimic, I create" (VIII, 240). The
Gander in the cage is the emblem of the spirit of Romance, the antithesis
of "things as they are" realism. Isolated, limited in experience to his
own capability for self-expression he projects dynamic illusions. Un-
touched by experience, he envisions the world "as it ought to be," but
his singing is ignored by both the scholar and the man of action.

Another animal, the silver stallion, is a major emblem in Figures
of Earth, The Silver Stallion, and Something About Eve. For Manuel it is
the image of Kalki, the last of the avatars of Vishnu, the form in which
the Hindu God will arrive to redeem mankind. For the Fellowship the
Silver Stallion is a major icon, the horse on which their champion rode
and the horse on which he will return. For Musgrave until he stops on
Mispec Moor, it may be Pegasus, the Greek flying horse who created the
spring on Hlppocrene that inspire poets, or it may be Kalki. If the
stallion is Pegasus he is, according to Horvendile, "the horse that bears
romantics even to the ultimate goal of their dreams" (X, 29). If he is
Kalki he "bears romantics even to the ultimate goal of all the gods"
(X, 29). The nature of "the divine steed" depends on the attitude of
its rider. Gerald Musgrave calls him Kalki, thereby choosing the re-
ligious aspect. When Gerald puts Kalki out to pasture on Mispec Moor,
he becomes just another horse and Musgrave is surprised to learn the
others riding toward Antan have horses very much like Kalki. Cabell has

106

in this symbolic horse represented the close association between poets
and redeemers. Both have romantic origins; poetic inspiration and re-
ligious redemption are interchangeable depending on the goal of the rider.
The horse is a part of the legend of Manuel that becomes the base for the
cult of Manuel and he is a part of the poet's notion that the origins
of his dreaming are supernatural. Kalki, like Antan and the mirror of
the Third Truth, is a romantic dream of unknowable perfection. He is a
symbolization of a time "when the minds of men are as clear as crystal"
(II, 229). As in Hindu mythology when Kalki comes all of mankind's mis-
takes will be blotted out and creation will begin again without the past.
The other important emblems suggest additional complexities in the
relationship between actuality and fiction: Manuel's tomb and the Sigil
of Scoteia. These emblems have a basic similarity in meaning: neither
is what it seems to be, but both create illusions which have force far
exceeding their substance. The Gander speaks of optimism, the highest
dynamic illusion according to Charteris, but the tomb and the Sigil repre-
sent the ultimate achievement of man's faith in the possibility of salva-
tion through two kinds of fiction: religion and dreams. The objects are
not so important as the spirit of Romance, inherent in man, which causes
him to respond with dynamic illusions, that in themselves guide men to
strive for a world "as it ought to be" rather than "the world as it is."
The Sigil may be a broken jar cap with meaningless markings; the tomb
may be empty and its jeweled icons decorated with vari-colored glass,
but imagination and aesthetic distance converts the appearance into a
truth greater than actuality. Kennaston knows what the Sigil really is

107

but he also knows the depth of the experiences that fill his dreams and
his novels. Jurgen knows what Manuel was, how he died, the quality of
materials used to immortalize him in stone, and the actual events of
Manuel's life and of the lives of the Fellowship. But at a distance and
in the workings of his memory, he succumbs to the power of the dynamic
illusion that he helped to shape, however falsely. In neither case does
the skepticism of knowledge or experience necessarily destroy the value
of a fiction.

Cabell's fictive vision, revealed through these emblems, encompas-
ses his conception not only of the poet's shaping of reality but also of
its importance to both ethical and cosmological matters. Rarely is any
element of allegory limited to matters of literature and literature's re-
lationship to the universe. Folklore, literature, and critical theory are
the impetus to broader discussions. Mirrors, veils, talking animals, and
icons are commonplace (emblems) in aesthetics, ethical teaching and re-
ligion. For Cabell they are embodiments of the essential positions which
he takes toward the imagination, the creative process, and the universe
reflected in that process. The artist may reach self realization through
the form and limitation of a three inch square mirror or he may be as the
gander, a caged creature in an underground world, isolated, optimistic and
self -propagating .

PART III
HISTORICAL POETS AND THE THEORY OF LITERATURE

Historical poets or literary artists appear in The Biography as
subjects of fictive literary discussion and as illustrative materials in
non-fictional essays. The prologue and epilogue to the collected works
are partly fictive and partly familiar essays. These books are potpouris
of Cabellian opinion as it was shaped in the twenty years leading to the
completion of the Storisende Edition and as it was finally arranged out
of its multiple original forms--book reviews, college essays, satirical
commentaries, and critical monograph8--into a cohesive pattern. Most
of the poets that Cabell uses in the expression of his theories appear
either in the prologue or epilogue, but several worthy of attention ap-
pear in fictive episodes in the novels and short stories of The Biography.

Beyond Life and Straws and Prayerbooks contain Cabell's conception
of literary history as well as his literary theory--the two are really
inseparable. For Cabell certain authors in the history of letters are
emblematic of his "theory as the working code of romance." Many writers
are alluded to throughout the non-fiction section of The Biography, but
a select few are given careful and detailed attention. The range of
taste and literary periods is broad: Christopher Marlowe, Francois
Villon, William Wycherly, William Congreve, Charles Dickens, William
Thackeray, Booth Tarkington, and Harold Bell Wright; and the critical
viewpoint is an amalgamation of biographical data, impressionistic
opinion, and aspish condemnation. Very few individual works are ex-

108

amlned in close detail because Charteris, the fictional Author-figure in
Beyond Life, disavows any desire to write "that dreary thing called liter-
ary criticism." Marlowe's plays are a notable exception, though the dis-
cussion of them could hardly be called close. Charteris conceives of this
group of writers as illustrative of major shifts in the history of the
poetic attitude and Economist literature.

Christopher Marlowe and Francois Villon epitomize the notion of
the artist as Economist: both transcend their human conditions to create
works of art. Marlowe's plays and poems must be set against their "pur-
chase price, which at crude utmost was the flung-away life of a shoe-
maker's oldest son, very discreditably murdered at twenty-nine. All
this, it must be remembered, was created — tangibly to exist where be-
fore existed nothing--by a young fellow who, as went material things,
was wasting his prospects in pot-house dissipation. At the birth of
much if not all this loveliness alcohol played the midwife" (I, 78),
Whatever the life Marlowe led it is justified by the immortal works left
behind. These works, however, enjoyed more success with other poets
than with the general public which came to them after Marlowe's death.
"It was by observing Marlowe that Shakespeare finally learned how to
write: and Milton 'formed himself on the same model" (I, 72). How-
ever, Marlowe had little talent in "voicing platitudes in unforgettable
terms, by virtue of which Shakespeare 'comes home' to most of us and re-
mains so universally quoted. Marlowe's utterance is lacking in that

Both authors also appear in fictional episodes.

110

element of triteness without which no work of art can ever be of general
appeal in a world of mostly mediocre people" (I, 72-73).

Charteris admires "the continuous stream of resonant verse" and
"the compact of all outlandish splendors" in Tamburlaine the Great. In
The Jew of Malta he sees a fiasco, but he finds that "every speech at-
tributed to ' Barrabas glints something of the bright malignity of light-
ning"! (I, 74), Edward the Second is described as "an annoyingly 'ade-
quate' piece of writing," that is merely a good example of the "chronicle
history." Hero and Leander dwells upon bodily beauty with great skill
and verbal craftsmanship. Dr. Faustus receives attention because of its
evocation of Helen. "The apostrophe of Faustus to Queen Helen apart from
the mere loveliness of words, thus pulsates with an emotion for which
there is really no expression in human speech. In imagination the poet
for one breathless moment stand8--face to face with that flawless beauty
of which all poets have perturbedly divined the existence somewhere, and
which life, as men know it, simply does not afford, nor anywhere foresee"
(I, 77). For that moment, according to Charteris, Faustus pawned his
soul and only after that moment does he repent as he is engulfed by Hell.

None of the great works is considered except aesthetically: "and
the most straitlaced may permissibly commend the Faustus with much of
that indifference to the author's personal 'morality' which renders
their enjoyment of the Book of Psalms immune to memory of the deplorable
affair with Uriah's wife" (I, 79-81). This final estimate of Marlowe's
fame is both an attack on literary scandal-mongering or moralistic criti-
cism, and an attempt to consider the work as having an existence beyond
the creator's limitations.

Ill

Francois Villon is an example of a poet whose degenerate life was
an integral part of his work. "The Grand Testament is a direct result of
its author's having been, plus genius, a sneak thief, a pimp, and a cut-
throat. From personal experience painfully attained in the practice of
these several vocations it was that Villon wove imperishable verses, and
he could not have come by this experience in any other way" (I, 80). The
purchase price, again, may be said to be worth it: "We are heartily
glad to have this Testament : and upon the whole, we are grateful to
Villon for having done whatever was necessary to produce this poem" (I,
80-81). Villon's creed was that "life, not merely as the parish authori-
ties order it, but as the laws of nature constrain it too, is so 'horrid'
that the only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as
one can come by. Besides wine gives you such stupendous notions for a
ballade, and enables you to comprehend the importance of writing it, as
you, who are so woefully unappreciated, who are so soon to die, alone can
write it: and equally does wine sustain you through the slow fine toil
of getting all the lovely words just right" (I, 83). According to Char-
teris, Villon's writing projects an abundance of both pity and terror--
Aristotle's requirements for all great poetry. The source of this pity
and terror was Villon's life and we all profit "directly by the fact that
Francois Villon was in the flesh, plus genius, a sneak thief, a pimp, and
a cutthroat" (I, 83). Where the biographical details are so important a
part of the poetic expression they cannot be ignored, but they must in no
way be reflected in the critical judgments imposed upon the work in later
generations.

112

Marlowe and Villon are examples of the serious creative artist
who attains his goal — immortality for his dreams--at any expense. Both,
in Charteris's estimation, sacrificed life for the cult of art, thereby
providing themselves with aesthetic importance far beyond their short
physical existence.

In William Wycherly, Charteris sees the encroachment of gallantry
on the poetic attitude. The substance of his plays is gallantry and the
major portion of his life was spent in pursuing the gallant attitude:
"The spendthrift had virile genius, which had he chosen, might have made
his name one of the greatest in English literature. Instead, he pre-
ferred to enjoy the material things of life, and, in the end, got from
his endeavors to do so, very little comfort" (I, 110). Wycherly was
ashamed of his writing career — a trait which Charteris finds typical of
many writers who feel that scribbling dreams is not adult employment.
He relied heavily on the life about him and gained his popularity for
the accuracy with which he described that life.

For Wycherly and his confreres were the first English-
men to depict mankind as leading an existence with no moral
outcome. It was their sorry distinction to be the first
English authors to present a world of unscrupulous persons
who entertained no especial prejudices, one way or the
other, as touched ethical matters; to represent such per-
sons as being attractive in their characteristics; and to
represent such persons, not merely as going unpunished,
but as thriving in all things. There was really never
a more disastrous example of literature's stooping to
copy life. (I, 112)

Wycherly and the Restoration playwrights are, for Charteris, the begin-
nings of Realism which was carried forward in later generations by Jane
Austen and in American letters during the first quarter of the twenti-
eth century.

113

William Congreve inherits Wycherly's mantle at the close of the
seventeenth century; he, very much as Wycherly had done, "leads fashion
as well as literature." Congreve wove "the mode of his day, and per-
mitted his art to be seriously influenced by the life about him" (I,
133). He depicts "a care-free land, where life, untrammeled by the
restriction of moral codes, untoward weather, limited incomes or appre-
hensions of the police, has no legitimate object save the pursuit of
amorous pleasures" (I, 137). Having devoted himself to writing beauti-
fully of this land until he was twenty-one, Congreve quit art to live
the gallant attitude which pervades his work. For the thirty remaining
years of his life he shaped "an apostasy of romance."

Charteris considers Congreve greater than Wycherly because he
transcended the world around him in his art, creating some of "the most
entertaining company in literature," especially Mrs. Millamant, who
obviously could have never existed in the flesh. In contrast to Marlowe
and Villon who expended all of themselves for art, Wycherly and Congreve
found the sacrifice not worth it and gave up art to pursue lives of gal-
lantry in which they made the best of what life offered and shrugged off
its inconveniences.

Charteris moves from Wycherly and Congreve to Richard Sheridan,
the Mountebank, who gave up art to become a man of affairs much in the
spirit of Dom Manuel. Sheridan's writing originated with his need for
money; his plays were pot-boilers. "Over and over again Sheridan wrote
and re-wrote his pot-boilers until they were masterpieces. . . , And
then, like Congreve, he recognized that the word-game is not worth the

lU

candle" (I, 60). Charteris quotes Sheridan's summary of his reasons
for giving up literature as a life work: "Deuce take posterityl . . .
A sensible man will bear in mind that all the world's delicacies are to
be won, if ever, from one's contemporaries. And people are generous to-
ward social rather than literary talents, for the sensible reason that
they derive more pleasure from an agreeable companion at dinner than
from having a rainy afternoon rendered endurable by some book or another"
(I, 160-161). The remainder of Sheridan's life is spent as a reputable
member of Parliament, as noted orator, and as a drunk. The apparent
point here is that he, as Wycherly and Congreve, is remembered as a liter-
ary artist even though they chose paths away from the sacrifice. Their
inmortality resides not in their lives but in their plays.

From the nineteenth century Charteris examines Dickens as an ex-
ample of an artist who "unfailingly misrepresented the life he pretended
to portray" (I, 188). He expurgated nature "so as to improve, aestheti-
cally upon the original." "He has painted a clear-cut picture of the
sort of world which he imagined he would like to inhabit" (I, 190). In
this world he is able to regard life optimistically.

Thackeray, also, wrote "ingenious travesty of everyday life for
artistic purposes" (I, 195). Both of these writers, according to Char-
teris, "succeeded in writing delightfully about their contemporaries by
the simple device of not telling the truth." They support the major con-
tention of Cabell's theory of literature that "art . . . must deal with
contemporary life by means of symbols'-' (I, 202). Dickens' characters
are "personifications of certain qualities," and Thackeray "explains the

115

meaning of his symbols over and over again, with delightfully indefen-
sible side-taking and moralizing" (I, 203). Both Thackeray and Dickens
are writers who "handle facts religiously, in that particular mood of
piety which holds that incomplete accord with a creator's will is irre-
ligious" (I, 203).

From the twentieth century Charteris selects Booth Tarkington as
the epitome of the novelist who courts the demands of the general read-
ing public. He is a writer with considerable talent: "poetic insight,"
"the knack of story-building," "liveliness of fancy," "perceptive eyes"
and "the dramatic gift of contriving and causing more convincingly a wide
variety of puppets in nothing resembling the puppet master" (I, 228-229),
In his talents Tarkington is said to display "a form of wealth which
should not be exempt from fair taxation. He has not over-taxed that
wealth: and while to write 'best - sellers' is by ordinary a harmless
and very often a philanthropic performance, in Mr. Tarkington' s case it
is a misappropriation of funds" (I, 231). The necessity of being pleas-
ant in order to keep an audience has corroded Tarkington, causing him to
produce an image of the world suggestive of "a cosmic gumdrop variegated
by oceans of molasses" (I, 231 ). With the terminology of the Economist,
Charteris chastizes an author of talent for not ignoring the likes and
dislikes of an audience. He mourns the loss of Tarkington' s genius to
the harbingers of the comfortable life.

In contrast to Tarkington' s genius misspent, Harold Bell Wright is
summarily dismissed by Charteris as "the most popular author typewriting
today." Wright is "the worthy representative of our popular standards in

116

reading matter during the opening years of the twentieth century." His
stories "move through five hundred generous pages . . . with never an ir^
congruous taint of liveliness or wit or imagination, narrating how the
heroine decorously acquired an impeccable male admirer, and how the two
of them, after suffering 'a number of other calamities', were eventually
married to each other. ... Mr. Wright's is precisely that conservative,
and unblushingly platitudinous, dullness, of which every syllable reeks
with 'wholesome sentiment,' such as we take comfort to see represented
in our senate-chambers, and to nod under on Sabbath mornings, and to re-
tail to our helpless children" (I, 235). The attack on Wright is in re-
ality an attack on popular taste as promulgated by those Charteris calls
"our true art critics" who are concerned with the communication of an
idea and not the adroit style in which it is communicated. Wright's
mediocre books are the best form of art for mediocre minds which make up
the reading public. His books do accomplish for these minds what art
should accomplish by bringing some assurance "that life is not a blind
and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion." For these
minds Wright does suggest something beyond life, something to combat dull-
ness on their mental level; and, so long as they feel that it is "a pretty
good story," it is some form of art.

Even with his recognition of the gradual deterioration of literary
art into the mediocre popular art of Tarkington and Wright, Cabell still
sees the Demiurge Romance at work creating fictional dynamic illusions
which are productive of good in man's somewhat dull and limited physical
existence. Very little about the contemporary literary world appeals to
him, but he continues to see the demiurgic spirit of Romance in that world,

117

In Straws and Prayerbooks Cabell turns to contemporary literature
and to his own book reviews of favored works to illustrate that part of
his theory concerning the motivation of the literary artists to divert
himself--to play with -common sense, piety, ageless symbols, death, di-
verting ideas, and his own posterity. Again the approach is biographical
and impressionistic; in these critical commentaries he turns more fre-
quently to the contents of individual works, examining them for stylistic
merits. The focal works and authors are Donn Byne's Messer Marco Polo,
Charles De Coster's The Legend of the Glorious Adventure of Ty Eulenspiegel,
his own Jurgen, Anatole France's La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque, Joseph
Hergesheimer ' s works and George's Moore's Carra Edition.

With the exception of Moore's Collected Edition these works are
chosen for discussion because they contrast with the realistic fiction
of the 1920' s and the 1930' s. For Cabell, Realism is the enemy which
must be combatted with exotic materials and elaborated style. Rather
than succumbing to the actual world around him as depicted by Theodore
Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and John Dos Passos, he chooses to turn away
from the artist as social critic to be artist as a man who, to divert
himself, plays with world values. His selections from contemporaries
to illustrate his theories indicate that he sees the problems of human-
ity on a larger scale than that of immediate social need. Humanity he
considers essentially unchanged and unchanging; he admires those who de-
pict its foibles while remaining at a symbolic distance. The truth that
might be revealed by the artist is not the truth of an instant in his-
tory; it is an absolute truth available to any artist's playing. These

118

examples are meant to illustrate those among Cabell's contemporaries
whom he thought successful or almost successful in such revelations.

Donn Byrne's Messer Marco Polo was for Cabell "a lot of unanti-
cipatable flotsam washed up from the wide sunless sea of 'realism".'
(XVII, 48). The book combined several qualities that attracted him: a
concern for stylistic niceties and point of view which grow out of Malachi
Campbell's Celtic telling of an oriental story; the elaborated diction,
and the fact that the tale 'exposes' or arraigns nothing whatever" (XVII,
49). The story, Cabell feels, is less important than the way in which it
is told: "its prodigality in the transforming magic which . . . quite
incommunicably lends romantic beauty to this or that not necessarily un-
usual or fertile theme, somewhat as sunset tinges the wooded and the bar-
ren mountains with equal glamour" (XVII, 49). For Cabell the book ap-
proaches wizardry in its invocation of four worlds at once: "The tale
. . . seems a fantastic and gracious pageant, saddened somehow by the
known evanescence of its beauty, and regarded through three opalescent
veils: or, rather, all that happens--just as we upon reflection prefer
to have had it happen, — in the Chinese jasmine garden by the Lake of
Cranes, is viewed through a rose-tinted gauze of mediaeval fancies seen
through thin aureate Celtic mists observed through the unhued but glaz-
ing windowpanes of a Westchester, N. Y., drawing-room" (XVII, 51). The '
book suggests Cabell's own goals "to write beautifully of beautiful hap-
penings." The tale, he thinks, has the true formula, the one he used in
so many of his works: "the hero who wanders footloose and at adventure
through lands which are to him and to the reader in nothing familiar. It
is the formula of the Odyssey, the formula of picaresque romance, and of

119

all fairy stories properly equipped with quests and an indomitable third
prince. It is, of course, precisely the one formula which cannot ever
lose its charm so long as men retain that frame of mind which seems co-
eval with recorded history, of being bored with the routine of their
daily living" (XVII, 54). Cabell might well be discussing his own work
and his own working code of romance in this analysis of the basic appeal
of Donn Byrne's Messer Marco Polo. The elements of the Cabellian fic-
tive world are apparent: mythology, legend, delicacy of style, and an in-
sistent modern viewpoint framing it all with slight skepticism.

Messer Marco Polo is historical fiction. The next book that Cabell
discusses at length is fictionalized legend. De Coster's The Legend of
the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Eulenspiegel is illustrative of Cabell's
observations about the rogue--the hero who defies all convention and law~
as a favorite character throughout literary history. Tyl Eulenspiegel has
for five centuries been famous in Belgium and the Netherlands as
"mischief-maker, Jack-of-all trades, and by turns fool, artist, valet
and physicianl" Of himself Tyl says: "A Fleming am I from the lovely
land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman, all in one, --and I go wandering
through the world, praising things beautiful and good, but boldly making
fun of foolishness" (XVII, 76). Cabell's attention here is devoted less
to style and more to the nature of the hero, and a national one at that,
"but what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young
rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has labelled
'Keep Out,' without pausing for some dalliance therein" (XVII, 80). Tyl
is, for Cabell, the best symbol of man's desire to break away from the

120

conventions that surround him. Such a legend as this grows out of
man's need to dream of being what he can never be — a rogue. "Everywhere,
in fine, this or that pleasant action is forbidden or in one way or an-
other restricted; and man, upon the verge of actual, sharp, zestful en-
joyment is brought up short by a taboo of his own inventing" (XVII, 82).
For all men "it is very pleasant to indulge in these sports vicariously
through considering the exploits of the Eulenspegelian rogue who does do
these things" (XVII, 82).

The literary artist has always shared mankind's interest in the
rogue and through him ideas of revolution: "In all polities imaginative
literature has tirelessly advocated revolution, by depicting the possi-
bilities of a more pleasure-giving state of affairs; and in his diver-
sion the artist has consistently tended to identify himself with the
rogue and the lawbreaker" (XVII, 83). The rogue, then, is to Cabell
the epitome of the literary artist's criticism of life and the piety
which shapes life. He is the symbolic representation of the diabolical
spirit to unsettle the conventional through ridicule and unconventional

behavior. Tyl Eulenspiegel and his counterparts in other national liter-

2
atures are the indications of this spirit.

Cabell's Jurgen, which shares rogue-hero qualities with Tyl Eulen-
spiegel, is the story of an unconventional man who opens doors that con-
ventional men keep shut. For opening these doors, Jurgen was suppressed
by John Sumner, Cabell, however, does not wish in the theoretical

2
Cabell lists Robin Hood, Cartouche, Rob Roy, Guzman d'Alforache,

Shinderhannes, Schubry, Lovelace, Tom Jones, Jack Sheppard, and Paul

Clifford.

121

context of Straws and Prayerbooks to prolong a discussion of censorship.
His main concern here is the literary artist playing with piety. Of the
right of Jurgen to exist as a book he says : "If Jurgen contained the
right constituents it would live; and if it lacked the stuff of longevity
it would in due course die: either way, the outcome was to be decided
neither by me nor by societies dedicated to the suppression of frankness,
nor even by a judge and a petty jury" (XVII, 134). Through his discus-
sion of Jur gen's merits and the validity of its censorship, Cabell fur-
ther demonstrates his feeling that all truly great art corrupts "in its
continual playing with piety and with common-sense." He acknowledges
that best-thought-of citizens who would keep art clean are right: "If art
were not very cruelly restrained it would impoison and wreck all civiliz-
ations, not here to speak of reordering heaven. But there is no need to
worry, because art, as it happens, is always, and probably always will
be, just thus restrained, by the inefficiency of the artist. So art may
never ruin America, after all" (XVII, 138). Having admitted to the
roguishness of his hero, Cabell deals one further blow to American let-
ters of the time by giving clear indication where he thinks The Biography
fits; he calls attention to the fact that at this time the representa-
tive of the art of letters in the National Hall of Statuary is General
Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, which is "the perfected expression
of the best-thought-of American ideals in literature" (XVII, 193). "When
judged by these ideals, Jurgen and all the rest of The Biography should be
decreed 'offensive, and lascivious, and lewd, and indecent'" (XVII, 139).
Apparently Cabell considers Jurgen to be the most likely candidate for

122

the position of American national rogue hero; for a brief season the novel

was at least the cause celebre of the anti-Puritan, anti-conventional

literary forces in the country.

Cabell turns from examples of the artist playing with common sense

and piety to the artist playing with death. The exemplary book is Ana-

tole France's La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque, which Cabell finds to

be like Dumas in content but unlike Dumas in that "between assignation

and combats," they "toy amorously with ideas." Again Cabell's interest

is less in stylistics and story than in one character who represents

an attitude that coincides with his own theories. That character in La

Rotisserie is I'Abbe Jerome Coignard whose creed is extremely urbane:

"Always bear in mind that a sound intelligence rejects everything that

is contrary to reason, except in matters of faith, where it is necessary

to believe blindly" (XVII, 143). Coignard' s thoughts always concern the

relationship between God and His children. In this concern Cabell sees

the importance of belief in something after death, for to attempt to

divert oneself by thinking that there is nothing which is a waste of

time. The nature of celestial architecture has long been one of man's

major dynamic illusions:

These conjectured kingdoms were, of course, the earli-
est chosen subject matter for poetic adornment everywhere:
poets were, of course, the first to guess at what it would
be most interesting to find beyond the black door: and
every ancient religion--again, of course — grew up from out
of our remote ancestors' indulgence in the two habits, now
equally obsolete, of reciting poetry and of taking it seri-
ously. They had at least the excuse that this poetry was
magnificent, because in surveying and populating these post
mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his
most inq)Osing reach of power, . . . Here he, indeed, has

123

need of power : for he is here intent to make sport with
his third great opponent, and to play with death; intent
to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent to
color roseately the dreadful face of doom, and intent to
detect in the skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile
of reassurance. (XVII, 147)

Coignard's concentration on God and His children leads Cabell to one of
his clearest statements of the relationship between the spirit of Romance
and one of man's major dynamic illusions, Religion. "Men have, out of so
many thousand years of speculation, contrived no surer creed than Coig-
nard's that in matters of faith it is necessary to believe blindly"
(XVII, 154).

The final two literary artists, other than himself, used to clarify
his literary theory are Joseph Hergesheimer and George Moore — two more
completely different writers it is hard to imagine. Cabell surveys Her-
gesheimer' s whole career as an example of the literary artist who becomes
a commercial success and gives up self-diversion for audience approval.
For fourteen years Hergesheimer wrote without having one story published
and in that fact Cabell finds what he considers to be the key to Herge-
sheimer 's art. In this time he, like all creative artists, is "an anchor-
ite vrfiose actual living is given over to his diversions in a withdrawn
and not overwholesome country whereinto no other person can ever enter;
and vAience he, tired out for the while by his playing, deviates now and
then into normal human life. . . as a talking and laughing and amorous and
blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons deviate into sleep and
into sleep's strange dreams" (XVII, 182).

Cabell's explanation of the fourteen years is that Hergesheimer
was writing for his own diversion, "playing at the game the artist must

124

always play." In Hergesheimer' s early novels he finds what he calls "a
queer analogue" to Christopher Marlowe's writing "men laboring toward

the unattainable, and a high questery failed" (XVII, 185). He sunmarizea

3
the basic plot of Hergesheimer ' s first four novels and discovers that

they all have the same basic theme: "That which one, for whatever
reason, finds most beautiful must become one's diversion from all
other interest; it is a goal which one seeks futilely, and with dis-
comfort and peril, but which one seeks inevitably'.' (XVII, 186). The
theme of the novels and the theme of the fourteen years are obviously
the same. "Beauty is divine; a power superior and somewhat elf inly
inimical to all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which
must unflinchingly be served. . . ." (XVII, 187). This is the divinity
that Hergesheimer also served "with strangely patterned evocations, in
striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings." Linda Condon (1919)
is viewed as a modern instance of domnei, "the worship of woman's beauty,
as, upon the whole. Heaven's finest sample of artistic self-expression,
and as in consequence, the most adequate revelation of God" (XVII, 188).
After the appearance of these five novels, Hergesheimer becomes a popular
success; he compromises his art for magazine audiences even though, ad-
mittedly, he continues to write well. Cabell finds it difficult to
sense that he has no other purpose than to direct himself. The ideas of
the first five novels "are not his idols but his playthings; and are the
diverting toys with which the anchorite has entertained his stay in that

3
Those novels are The Lay Anthony, Mountain Blood, Java Head, and

Balisand.

125

withdravm, queer, lonely country to which also I recently referred"
(XVII, 202).

Cabell checks his criticism of any but the first five books be-
cause he came to be friends with Hergesheimer and talked at length with
him about the later works; in such a relationship he finds that he can
no longer be sure of his opinions. For purposes of the literary discus-
sions only Hergesheimer 's fourteen years of self -diverting play and his
concern with Beauty interest Cabell.

For the idea of self-perpetuation as a main goal of the artist,
he chooses to discuss George Moore's Carra Edition. This idea is the
main tenet of the Economist, and in Straws and Prayer books as Cabell
completes his own Collected Edition, he satirizes the twentieth century
end of this idea of immortality and permanence through literature. Eight
of the first fourteen volumes are Realistic Novels which must not be
taken too seriously: "that sort of realism--the realism of 'the human
document'; and the selected 'corner of creation' here to re-echo that
for time's old f angled catchword" (XVII, 221).

Indirectly, Cabell seems to be poking fun at himself as well as
the literary trend of producing collected editions. To him the basic
drive of the Economist is immortality through literary efforts. In George
Moore's expensive subscription edition he sees the final modern form of
that theory--the preservation of worthless realistic fiction. "George
Moore, at last at ease in the exclusive company of one thousand subscrib-
ers only, can now speak freely without bothering about such finicking
contemporareous notions of delicacies and indelicacy as, we now learn,
had until the printing of this Carra Edition somewhat hampered him. And

126

for the rest, even in their most tedious passages of brilliant psychology,
Mr, George Moore's Realistic Novels really do remain interesting relics.
As museum pieces their value is plain" (XVII, 224), Cabell dislikes
Moore's style, his point of view, and his subject matter. To him Moore
lacks a conscious point of view and an adequate vocabulary. Of his style
Cabell says: "George Moore is ... so convincingly the great prose ar-
tist everywhere in manner and gesture that we are rather generally apt to
overlook his frequent omission to be anything of the sort in his writing"
(XVII, 224). He finds Moore's omniscient author technique — his constant
intrusion into the text to discuss himself — an unwieldly device in fic-
tion. He dislikes Moore's extensive use of description and he abhors the
use of "ready made and time-battered phrases." The Carra Edition is an
attempt to perpetuate Moore's Work by giving it a facade of permanence
where there is none. It is an attempt to extend an egotistical artist's
fame far beyond its temporal value by giving it beautiful uniform bind-
ings, excellent print, and prefaces. The Carra Edition, is to Cabell, a
travesty of his Economist notions and one suspects that indirectly his
ridicule of it is a self-judgment upon his own attempt at immortality in
the Storisende Edition.

Cabell's examination of these particular writers extends and com-
plicates his theory of literary art as self-diversion while, at the same
time, clarifying his highly individualistic conception of the literature
of the 1920' s and 1930*8. As he discusses the individual writers and
works, it becomes clear that his literary theory includes more than a
series of abstract statements about Romance, dynamic illusion. Beauty.

127

and diversion. It is also a practical critical theory which leads him
to examine point of view, symbolism, fictionalization of ideas, stylis-
tics, characterization, and structuring. The commentaries can not be
called detailed textual studies, for there is too much emphasis on bio-
graphical detail and sophisticated joshing, but they are apparently based
on rather close readings of the works and an understanding of how these
works fit into the world of letters as seen from this particular theore-
tical viewpoint.

Cabell concludes Straws and Prayer book3 nostalgically by having
the editor and author of the Storisende Edition meet the author of The
Eagle's Shadow. Together the young and the old Cabell agree that the
goal — to write beautifully of beautiful happenings — has been worth the
expense of time and life. The playing with common sense, piety, death,
and ideas that is represented in the uniform edition, The Biography of
the Life of Pom Manuel, has been diverting and at least fifteen hundred
subscribers will help to perpetuate Cabell.

The major uses of literary personages in fictional episodes occur
in The Line of Love, A Certain Hour, Jurgen, and Something About Eve.
Christopher Marlowe appears as a poet-hero courting Cynthia Allonby in
a short story, "Porcelain Cups." In Jurgen, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whit-
man, and Mark Twain are referred to as a part of a satirization of the
censorship trial of Jurgen; in Something About Eve, two poet figures,
Nero and Villon, visit Gerald Musgrave on Mispec Moor and engage in a
literary discussion with him ; and A Certain Hour is a collection of ten
short stories dealing with the ten figures Manuel shaped out of clay in

128

Figures of Earth. These ten writers are Robert Herrick, Alexander Pope,
Bishop Ufford, Raimbant de Vaqueriras, Shakespeare, Allesandro de Medici,
William Wycherly, Richard Sheridan, Paul Vanderhof fen, and John Charteris.

Marlowe appears in "Porcelain Cups" as a scorned suitor who de-
cided against giving up his career in poetry for a woman. The story is
a simple one about the courtships of Cynthia Allonby by a gallant hero,
a chivalrous hero, and a poet; significantly the gallant hero gains
Cynthia's hand. Davis finds this story to be one of the most cogent
fictional presentations of the three basic attitudes and their relation-
ships to each other as symbolized in the courtship of Cynthia.^ Cynthia
burns one of Marlowe's poems, and he denounces her by comparing her
values to two porcelain cups. Of the three heroes, only the poet accord-
ing to Davis grasps Cynthia's true essence as a stupid, well-meaning,
pretty, scented animal.

Most of the tales in A Certain Hour are less about the poetic at-
titude than about chivalry or gallantry. This is true of the tales about
Raimbaut de Vaqueriras, Allesandro de Medici, William Wycherly, Bishop
Ufford, and Richard Sheridan. All but the Raimbant de Vaquereras tale
about honor and woman worship are tales of gallantry. The poetic achieve-
ment of the individual writers is given little attention; in effect,
these stories depict the recurring theme of the literary artist who de-
cides that he would prefer to live his attitude than to write about it.
Each of the stories depicts some gallant episodes which illustrate this
choice: Allesandro enjoys his lust, Ufford commits adultery, Wycherly

Savis, pp. 112-113.

129

makes love in his waning years, Sheridan tries his hand at burglary with
a female partner. In a sexual episode with an old flame, Judith, the
story about Shakespeare symbolically represents the inability of the
poet to capture the fire of his earlier creations. The same pattern
occurs in the story about Charteris, when for a moment the poet thinks
that he might be able to stir up the old creative impulses. In each
case a woman is the symbol of artistic and romantic achievements. Each
is rejected as being worthless in the artist's present creative imagin-
ing. Literary art and the immortality provided by it overcome physical
limitations in the stories about Herrick, Vanderhof f en, and Pope. Her-
rick, after returning from death to examine his literary reputation,
decides in favor of death over continuation of human existence. His
literary immortality is apparently enough. Vanderhof fen gives up his
life as a man of affairs to write poetry; and Pope withdraws from a
love affair in favor of true love between a country girl and a swain,
only to have that love end in tragedy. Out of that tragedy he shapes a
poem, "On Two Lovers Struck Dead by Lightning," which immortalizes them
and himself, achieving far more valuable results than could have been ac-
complished by a consummated physical relationship.

The theme of A Certain Hour is that true poets are not very ac-
ceptable human beings and that truly gallant or chivalrous men do not
make very conscientious poets. Poets' lives are touched by the irra-
tionality and passion of Audela's fire, Freydis' magic. As some of
Cabell's favorite real and fictional poets, the ten are given brief
examinations at certain hours when they fail as human beings to succeed

130

as poets or forsake poetry for doubtful success as human beings. The
poets are isolated from society; their failure to adjust to convention
is instrumental in the imaginative self-expression which produces a work
of art.

Cabell never completely abandoned the idea of the isolated, suf-
fering but worldly-wise artist and his ineptness as a human being. In-
deed, Charteris' theme in Beyond Life and the essence of the Economist
theory of literature is that the poet must use his life and if necessary
sacrifice it for the sake of his poetic expression. The stories that he
writes about the ten poets are consistently stories of mutually exclusive
failure in either life or poetry. A Certain Hour contains narratives
about those poets who did not compromise their art and those who did. In
some ways being touched at all by the poetic attitude results in failure.
With the exception of Shakespeare, no one of the poets discussed achieves
absolute success in living; some achieve success in poetry, but those
who give up poetry generally live lives of dissipation in which they
constantly shrug off the importance of life and immortality. Pope is
Cabell's example of complete expression of the poetic attitude; Wycher-
ly, Congreve, and Sheridan are examples of lives that might have been put
to better use had they been sacrificed for art.

Cabell satirizes this theme of poetic unconventionality in one of
Jurgen' s episodes. Significantly this episode ridicules the censorship
trial of Jurgen. Jurgen is captured by the Philistines after they have
laid siege to Psendopolis, the capital of Leuke, the country of Greek
Heroes ruled by Helen. The only witness against Jurgen is "the tumble
bug," a rather obvious representation of John Sumner, an agent of Anthony

131

Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who brought the
case against Jurgen. The tumble bug comes in "rolling in front of him
his loved and properly housed young ones. With the creature came pages,
in black and white, bearing a sword, a staff, and a lance" (VI, 239). He
says: "Now, by St. Anthony', this Jurgen must forthwith be relegated to
limbo, for he is offensive and lewd and indecent" (VI, 239). Then parody-
ing the accusations brought against Jurgen, the tumble bug defines the
position of the moral arbiters: "You are offensive . . . because this
page has a sword which I choose to say is not a sword. You are lewd be-
cause that page has a lance which I prefer to think is not a lance. You
are lascivious because yonder page has a staff which I elect to declare
is not a staff. And finally, you are indecent for reasons of which a
description would be objectionable to me, and which therefore I must
decline to reveal to anybody" (VI, 239).

Continuing his attack on unconventional behavior in literature,
the tumble bug recites precedents in the past: "the only three detected
makers of literature that have ever infected Philistia, thanks be to
goodness and my vigilance, but for both of which we might have been no
more free from makers of literature than are the other countries" (VI,
240). The tumble bug — Cabell's symbolization of the arbiter of American
literary morality — outlines how he handled Poe, Whitman, and Twain, the
three writers for whom Cabell had respect: "Yes, there was Edgar whom I
starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back
alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there
was Walt, whom I chivied and battered from place to place, and made a

132

paralytic of him: and him too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivi-
ous and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into
disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to
be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away
the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could
not get at him" (VI, 240). The concentration here is obviously on bio-
graphical generalization and not on individual works except perhaps in
the statement about the of fensiveness of Whitman and the posthumous pub-
lication of some of Twain's work. Slyly, Cabell places his own work in
the ranks of Poe, Whitman, and Twain, but he also uses this episode to
lambast the censoring forces who were seeking to mold literature into
agreement with the conventions of a general public. The militant voice
of this conventionality is suitably a tumble bug that lives on dirt.
There is no doubt that the censorship of Jurgen, in this episode
represented by the Philistine's trial of the character, Jurgen, left
Cabell feeling a close kinship with the other isolated, suffering, and
maligned artists of American letters.

In Somethire About Eve two historical poet-figures are used to
fictionalize aspects of the theory of literature. While Gerald Musgrave
is visiting Maya on Mispec Moor before journeying to Antan, he receives
poets, legendary, and mythical figures who are completing their journeys.
Among the visitors are two representative poets: Nero and Villon. Mus-
grave questions these men and they in answering his questions discuss
each other,

Nero's life had been a poem — "a unique masterpiece in the way of

133

self-expression: he, above all other men, had served the one end of

every poet's art by revealing the true nature of man's being":

The legend of Nero was in a world wherein every other
man stayed more or less unwillingly an unfulfilled Nero,
the supreme type of the literature of escape. The legend of
Nero was a poem which men would not forget: it was a poem
familiar in all languages: and it was a poem which, now,
everybody could cordially admire and delight in, because
time had removed the need of considering any current moral
standards or one's own physical safety in judging the poem,
now that Nero was only a character in a book, like — as the
Emperor said, with a quaint revealment of his retained in-
terest in literature--like lago or Volpone or Tartuffe. For
whether you called any particular book a history or a poem or
a drama did not, of course, affect the impressiveness and vigor
and complexity of the character drawing in it, nor the value
of the author's apt and edifying revelations, (X, 178)

Villon says of his traveling companion, Nero, that his life

lacked one necessary ingredient which he, Villon, had: "a touch of

tenderness without which no work of art is of the first class." Villon's

life, too, was a poem; he was a "hog with a voice." Villon

. . . had become a never-dying myth of vagabondage with
its heart in the right place, and a parable which revealed
how much of good always survived in the most vile and
abandoned of criminals and even in persons unsuccessful in
business life. The legend of Villon thus proved exactly
the contrary to that which was proved by the legend of
Nero: as the one demonstrated the real nature of man to
aspire only to lust and cruelty the moment that inhibitions
were removed, so did the other legend show the real funda-
mental nature of every man to be incurably good and lovable
under all possible surface stains. And the legend of Villon,
Villon repeated, had in it tenderness, — that indispensable
flavor of tenderness and of a sentimentality, without which
no work of art can ever really be of the first class so far
as goes its popular appeal. (X, 182)

Villon is Cabell's version of the poet maudit, a favorite image of the

creative artist's character at the fin de siecle.

134

The legends of Nero and Villon are opposites: one demonstrates
"the real nature of man to aspire only to lust and cruelty the moment
that inhibitions were removed," and the other shows "the real funda-
mental nature of every man to be incurably good and lovable under all
possible surface strains." Villon had lived in the gutter, but his eyes
had been on the stars. In this idea Gerald sees all human aspirations,
sung loudly, beautifully, and with tenderness, but nonetheless foiled.
Nero, on the other hand, calls attention to the fact that we are moved
by such a figure without knowing why — which is "the image of poetry."
Asked what truth they, Villon and Nero, hope to find in Antan, they
answer that for the poet "there exists always just as many truths as he
cares to imagine" and that "there exist more truths than any poet cares
to imagine."

Notably the legendary Villon and Nero travel together toward Antan,
although they are divergent in their teaching. Cabell uses these mythic-
historical figures to express allegorically and critically that rela-
tionship between the realistic point of view (absolute self-expression)
and the romantic point of view (self-expression which looks to the ideal-
ized vision of itself) as not being diverse at all. Just as he says in
a letter to Dreiser that they merely say the same things about human
nature in divergent manners, so he shows Villon, the romantic medieval
poet, and Nero, the archpoetic realist-egotist, walking compatibly toward
Antan together, each veiling the central mystery of self-expression under
variant methods, both touched with skepticism. They reflect the para-
doxical truth both of romanticism and naturalism, of illusion and

135

mechanistic reality.

Most of the salient points of the theory of literature, the poetic
attitude, the Economist artist, Demiurge, dynamic illusion, romantic-
naturalism, and diversion, are augmented by fictional symbolic represen-
tation within The Biography. These points and others more closely con-
cerned with individual works and the ideas in those works are clarified
in the non-fictional sections. The prevalence of such materials in the
Ideational and flctive content of The Biography is indicative of Cabell's
consistently and meticulously developed literary theory. The Cabellian
method draws his whole literary output i fiction, criticism, reviewing,
and autobiography, into his completed work.

CONCLUSION

James Branch Cabell makes literature the radix bonorum of The
Biography. For him literature and the literary artist are the earthly
analogues of the idea of creation. The act of creation, the work of the
poet whether human or supernatural, is one of his central motifs. Man
lives by his creations, more specifically the intangible shapings of his
mind. Most men make something with their minds and adhere to that some-
thing which poets make for publication; they shape their dreams and free
them to effect changes or experiences in the minds of other men. The
process of imaginative making lies at the center of human behavior at
the center of literature.

Cabell's The Biography of the Life of Pom Manuel is in part an
examination of mankind's poetic powers and their interrelationship with
the other patterns of history. Cabell sees all fiction as escapist: but
in that term he does not exclude realism. Fiction is imagined and it is
addressed to the imagination; the imagination is the mental process where-
by man gets out of himself and his physical limitations. So, logically,
fiction is in essence, escapist, no matter what its theme.

The poet is a maker who uses all that he is and all that he ex-
periences in his work. It is inseparable from him, hence, the constant
autobiographical references throughout The Biography^ Cabell clearly

■^Cabell, As I Remember It (New York, 1955), p. 155.
^Cabell, Ladies and Gentlemen (New York, 1937), p. 193.

136

137

associates his own poetic endeavors with those of Horvendile, Charteris,
Musgrave, and Kennaston. The author of any work is its demiurge, hold-
ing a position analogous to that of an omnipotent God. As such he, the
author, is never completely outside the fiction. Like God in panthe-
istic theory, the creator and his creation are one. Cabell views The
Biography as a cosmos that is the result of an act of self-expression.
The audience who experiences that work must in its reading experience the
same creative process as the artist. In essence the work must be valued
on its own terms and not on the basis of any preconceptions.

Cabell does not always obey his own dicta for he frequently applies
his critical preconceptions to the work of realism. However, in many
cases he is able to overcome his bias and admire works such as those of
Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Even then he neatly fits those who
write of contemporary life into his own vision of what fiction should ac-
complish. Sinclair Lewis's myth-like midwest and Dreiser's belief in
naturalism and the myth of success are to Cabell fictional exploration
of modern life by means of symbol. Even in George Moore's works he sees
a situation akin to his own — the artist's ego as the focal point of his
creations. And much best-selling fiction he thinks necessarily mediocre,
to supply the needs of mediocre minds.

No part of his writing fiction, essays, book reviews, or critical
articles, escaped from the final shaping of his literary theory. His life
and his literature were one and he never ceased to use himself and those
within his circle as subjects from which to form ideas or fictions.
Cabell is always meeting Cabell throughout the works and neither ever
takes the other too seriously. The end result of this artistic mirror-

138

gazing is a critical theory of literature which is the more worthy be-
cause it is never dogmatic without reminding itself of that dogmatism.
Cabell lays no claim to originality; he calls forth his sources regu-
larly; Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Thackeray, Schiller, Wilde,
and Stevenson. The Biography is itself an illustration of the theory
that it postulates. Cabell constantly writes of his more theoretical
essays as though they were fiction no less than the stories, allegorical
journeys, and places.

The Biography remains unique in American letters because of its
independence from dominance by any literary movement. It has been common
practice for critics to say that CabellKved after his time as a literary
artist; presumably more suitable times could have been Ancient Greece,
Medieval France, Elizabethan, Restoration, Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century England, and Twentieth Century American. His theory is even as
timeless for it suggests the aesthetic principles of Plato and Aristotle,
Renaissance Platonism, nineteenth century romantic critical theory,
twentieth century New Criticism,^ and the twentieth century aesthetics
of Cassirer, Langer and Collingwood. Cabell broke the boundaries of time
and literary movements by seeming to incorporate some parts of the major
literary periods into his fiction and his theory of literature. He is
not of another age; his eclectic nature makes him an emblem of modernity.

Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), p. 284.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams , M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York, 1958.

Cabell, James Branch. As I Remember It. New York, 1955.

. Between Friends , ed. Padraic Colum and Margaret Freeman Cabell c

New York, 1962.

. Ladies and Gentlemen. New York, 1937.

_. Let Me Lie. New York, 1947.

_. Preface to the Past. New York, 1936.

. Quiet, Please. Gainesville, Fla., 1952.

_. There Were Two Pirates. New York, 1946.

_. These Restless Heads. New York, 1932.

_. Smire. New York, 1937.

_. Smirt. New York, 1934.

_. Smith. New York, 1935.

. Special Delivery. New York, 1933.

. The Works of James Branch Cabell, Storisende edition, 18 vols.

New York, 1927-1930:

I. Beyond Life (pub. 1919)

II. Figures of Earth (pub., 1921)

III. The Silver Stallion (pub. 1926)

IV. Domnei (pub. as The Soul of Melicent, 1913, rev. 1920)
and The Music from Behind the Moon (1926)

V. Chivalry (pub. 1919, rev. 1921)

VI. Jurgen (pub. 1919)

VII. The Line of Love (pub. 1905, rev. 1921)

VIII. The High Place (pub. 1923)

IX. Gallantry (pub. 1907, rev. 1922)

X. Something About Eve (pub. 1927)

XI. The Certain Hour (pub. 1916)

XII. The Cords of Vanity (pub. 1909, rev. 1920)

• XIII. From the Hidden Way (pub. 1916, rev. 1924) and The Jewel
Merchants (pub. 1921)

XIV. The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (pub. 1915)

139

140

XV. The Eagle's Shadow (pub. 1904, rev. 1923)
XVI. The Cream of the Jest (pub. 1917) and The Lineage of
Lichfield (pub. 1922)
XVII. Straws and Prayer-Books (pub. 1924)
XVIII. Townsend of Lichfield (pub. 1930)

Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America. New York, 1941.

Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. New York, 1958.

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(Winter, 1956-57), 214-220.

"Cabell and the Modern Temper," The South Atlaatic Quarterly,

LVIII (Spring, 1959), 176-84.

Parks, Edd. "James Branch Cabell," in Southern Renascence, eds. L. D.
Rubin, Jr. and R. D. Jacobs. Baltimore, 1953.

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Dissertation. Columbia University, 1954.

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Cabell," in South: Modern Southern Literature and Its Cultural
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City, New York, 1961.

Van Doren, Carl. James Branch Cabell. New York, 1932.

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. "The James Branch Cabell Case Reopened," New Yorker, XXXII

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VITA

Charles Farrell Gray was born on January 27, 1931, in Rome,
Georgia. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school class
in 19A8, he attended Emory University from which he received the de-
grees of Bachelor of Arts (1951) and Master of Librarianship (1952).

Upon completion of a stint in the army, he became Assistant
Humanities Librarian at the University of Georgia, but two years later,
returned to school. At the University of Florida he served variously
as a reference librarian, a branch librarian, and a teacher of library
science, while completing the degree Master of Arts in English (1958).
During the time that he was working on his doctorate he taught English
at the University of Florida and Jacksonville University,

Mr. Gray is married and has three sons.

141

This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the chairman
of the candidate's supervisory committee and has been approved by all
members of that committee. It was submitted to the Dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences and to the Graduate Council and was approved as
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy.

August 13, 1966.

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Dean, College /of Arts and Sciences

Dean, Graduate School

Supervisory Committee:
Chairman

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